Dear Fellow Shareholders,

Last fiscal was an electrifying year for us. We not only became a publicly traded company in April 2024 but also finished at over $1.0 billion in Subscription ARR, growing 39% year-over-year while making significant leaps toward profitability. Rubrik delivered the rare combination of high top-line growth and fast-growing free cash flow margins.

But here’s what really matters. We’re building a generational company. We aspire Rubrik to be a truly exceptional company with no finish line. Then the question is: how do you build an enduring institution? You need great talent and ever-evolving products, all governed by strong cultural values and unlimited company ambition.

I’ve been an outsider all my life. Whether immigrating to the U.S. from India, working at companies like Oracle, attending Wharton, or becoming a venture capitalist, I was entering unfamiliar territory. It was only once I co-founded Rubrik that I moved from “outsider” to “insider.” As we created our culture from the ground up, I felt strongly that Rubrik should have a collaborative, trusting, maximal thinking and risk-tolerant culture — in other words, a culture hospitable to outsiders.

Our Culture

Our culture is encapsulated as RIVET — Relentless, Integrity, Velocity, Excellence and Transparency. These values serve as our compass even when the map changes. What does culture really mean though? It’s not what is written on the wall but what really happens when the founders are not in the room. How do we work with each other to produce exemplary work? How do we not let the past cloud our judgment for the future? How do we consistently raise our collective ambition for the company?

In our weekly Executive Leadership Team meeting my Co-Founder Arvind and I often debate why we are building, what we’re building or why we aren’t moving even faster. Our conversations can get heated but it’s important to us that other leaders in the company see this. That we have an open and transparent dialogue in which we challenge each other to uncover edge-case insights and solutions. Fostering this type of environment is how we can make high-quality decisions and reduce blind spots when we’re operating at high speeds.

Age of Acceleration

Speed matters especially in an age of technology acceleration. Microsoft took 20 years to become a household name, Google 5 years, Facebook 2 years and ChatGPT just 3 months. Rapid technology changes means businesses must reorient constantly. The product-market fit is now effectively dead and zero-to-one must happen every few months. The traditional “Executive Mode” of top-down command and control playbooks no longer work. By the time you come up with a plan, delegate it and then let it cascade through the ranks, the plan no longer works. That’s why I ask my leaders to live at the edge of innovation and obsessively keep their ears to the ground. Last year, I traveled around the world doing over 400 customer meetings to ensure we continuously adjust our strategy to stay ahead of technology shifts.

Forward Motion

The key to success in the age of technology acceleration is to maintain maximal momentum while preparing for what’s coming next. To do this, we use the combination of Forward Motion, scaling current successes, and Lateral Motion, building and exploring new opportunities. Our Forward Motion is taking our cyber resilient Data Protection business from scale to super-scale.

We do this by expanding our data protection solutions across new applications and workloads that span enterprise, cloud and SaaS environments while exploring new routes to market, accelerating distribution networks, serving new customers and expanding our value proposition within our customer base. Our investments in data security — years before ransomware became a headline topic — have resulted in scaled businesses with broad adoption today. This is how we’ve been able to transform the legacy backup and recovery budget into a data security investment that delivers cyber resilience.

Lateral Motion

But you can’t just rely on Forward Motion to achieve sustained success. Failing to innovate or explore new opportunities could lead to eventual stagnation. In other words, by the time one product is scaling, it’s already time to start building the next product strategy. We allocate resources — time, talent and money — across a portfolio of innovation initiatives as the Lateral Motion to unlock the next S-curve. If you don’t build a Lateral Motion, you risk falling behind. Furthermore, we take a portfolio approach to S-curves, in which we’re managing innovations at different points on various S-curves.

Market Transitions

To do this, we have a dedicated team staffed with folks who excel at going from zero to one — finding new product-market fit. This helps us operate a multi-product portfolio while reducing complexity. Within a product discipline, we often deploy different go-to-market teams to establish higher positions on an S-curve while we’re still adding and fine-tuning new capabilities. This is how we go faster in developing new markets with significant upside and in leading market transitions.

Just like any portfolio of risks, some bets work, some don’t. When they work, the mission becomes going from one to scale by combining both Lateral and Forward Motions. We’ve used this approach to build, for example, our M365 Protection solution into a scale business. We’re using the same approach to introduce new Identity Resilience solutions that bring data context and identity together for the first time in the industry. We’ll continue using these Forward and Lateral Motion teams to explore and scale horizontal use cases from our vantage point at the nexus of data, security and AI.

Finally, I am proud of the unwavering customer focus and relentless disciplined execution by all Rubrikans globally to produce our phenomenal year for our shareholders. An enduring company is built off the backs of great people who accept reality, think maximally and act with a sense of urgency to transform vision into reality. Below, I attach my original letter published in our IPO prospectus to explain my philosophy of maximal thinking and business building.

As I often share with our team, what we do matters and our future is bright. Thank you to our customers and partners who trust us to secure their data and business. Thank you to our shareholders for your support and trust. We’re just getting started. The best is yet to come.

Bipul Sinha
CEO, Chairman & Co-Founder

P.S. My travels around the world allow me to indulge my other passion in life: food.

Here are my top 5 bold eats around the world.

Ambassadors Clubhouse, London
Home to the best masala tea

Aga’s, Houston
The curries are top notch

Gulati Restaurant, New Delhi
Butter chicken to die for

Zou Zou’s, New York City
The ultimate fire-roasted lamb

Revolver, Singapore
Avant-garde Indian with a twist of fire

 

 

 

Letter from the CEO, April 2024 (IPO Prospectus):

I believe in maximal thinking — constantly imagining a limitless, extraordinary future, while accepting contradictions and maximizing present opportunities. By accepting contradictions, we accept reality — that is the starting point for progress.

I have been fortunate to be able to sit on multiple sides of the table - from software engineer to people manager to venture capitalist to founder and CEO. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on how to weave together complex software platforms, company culture, risk capital, value creation, and market transitions to create durable businesses. When market transitions occur, opportunity arises to transform and massively expand existing markets.

These disruptions allow new products to gain market relevance quickly and set the agenda of the new market order. This is precisely why I left my venture partnership to start Rubrik. The legacy backup and recovery market was ripe for such a transformation into data security based on cloud and cybersecurity trends. I believed there was an opportunity to build a lasting company.

Rubrik was founded on a vision to deliver business resilience by securing the most critical asset of any organization - data. We built a distinct architecture to combine data and metadata (application context) from business applications across the cloud to ensure data security and availability irrespective of incidence. This allowed us to transform backup data into a strategic asset that sits at the epicenter of security and artificial intelligence. Our original architecture uniquely enables application of artificial intelligence directly between data and security to deliver resilience against cyberattacks. We aim to build an enduring institution underpinned by a unique platform that delivers data security products to solve critical problems and delight our customers. Our goal is to lead the data security market which we believe is the future of cybersecurity.

Rubrik lives on the frontier of innovation, and our long-term success depends on our ability to continuously create and commercialize pioneering products. However, vision is useless by itself. We believe a strong culture and disciplined execution are required to build a durable company. That’s why we defined our cultural principles before hiring our first employee. Our culture is encapsulated as RIVET — Relentless, Integrity, Velocity, Excellence and Transparency. RIVET is our north star to empower our colleagues to do their best work, foster long-term thinking, and grow professionally without limits. From the beginning, we have intentionally designed Rubrik to be a living, breathing system. RIVET encourages debate and constructive conflict in order to render high-quality decisions and reduce blind spots when operating at speed. Our ability to continue to adapt, overcome adversity, and leverage emerging technologies and market transitions rests on fostering our unique culture.

We aspire to be a truly exceptional company with no finish line. Building an enduring institution requires maximal thinking. From very early investments in go-to-market to rapidly expanding platform scope, we have taken a unique approach to risk capital since day one to accelerate the business. While our company has grown in organizational size and experience, our mindset, sense of urgency, and risk posture remain as if we were still in the same tiny room as on day one. We will continue to invest in yet-to-be-certain markets and non-consensus ideas, with the approach to create customer and shareholder value. Our goal is to ensure Rubrik has the best opportunities to achieve its highest potential.

Maximal thinking is how I lifted myself out of poverty, built a life in America, and created Rubrik with my co-founders. I am very lucky to have amazing parents who taught me to think that way. I feel very lucky to be building Rubrik. We are defining the future of cybersecurity. In today’s world, no government or business is immune to cyberattacks. What we do matters.

We hope you will join us on this journey to secure the world’s data and build an impactful company along the way.

Best,

Bipul Sinha
CEO, Chairman & Co-Founder