Guest: Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean, and Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins
“I’m an engineer, so I have doubts about everything,” says Glean founder and CEO Arvind Jain. Well ... almost everything. Since launching Glean in 2019, he has held to the belief that “all of us are going to have really powerful AI assistants” in the future. With a several-year lead on generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Glean has built a growing club of CIO fans. With the broad acceptance of AI over the past year, Arvind says, “the level of confidence is higher than ever before.”
In this episode, Arvind, Mamoon, and Joubin discuss golfer hats, ideas vs. execution, X1, energy audits, small towns in India, IIT, proving yourself, Rubrik, rejecting product-led growth, “workplace assistants,” CIO fans, internet ’94, Parker Conrad, and work as a hobby.
In this episode, we cover:
- Arvind’s newfound fame (01:08)
- The state of the AI business (03:42)
- “Why now?” (06:05)
- Building great products (09:16)
- Company-building (11:27)
- Arvind’s childhood (14:37)
- Competition and hard work (16:44)
- Leaving Google (18:46)
- Glean vs. Rubrik (20:53)
- The future of work (27:22)
- “Holy shit” moments (29:25)
- Finding positivity (32:51)
- AI hype (34:31)
- How to pick a venture capitalist (38:55)
- Turning off (42:24)
- Hiring and the meaning of “grit” (44:41)
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