Startup Culture

Rubrik, one of the fastest growing SaaS companies, have defined a set of cultural values for their employees to live by and they call it RIVET.

Relentlessness - Don’t take no for an answer - to explore something challenging and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Integrity - High moral standards when dealing with customers.

Velocity - More distance in less time :D. Velocity is the only weapon a startup has against all the big companies who have infinite resources.

1. Make decisions fast - no more than 2 meetings per decision.
2. Its ok to make less than 50% wrong decisions - Don’t waste time in making every decision right.

Excellence - Leaving things better than how they were.

Transparency - Let all the employees know the good and bad news, the challenges in the company so that everyone is aligned in the same direction.

1. Make the information discussed in the board meeting be available to all members of the company - This way all employees would be inspired from the top and follow the same culture. This was Bipul’s way to inspire and encourage everyone towards transparency.
2. The Cost of Transparency - You would find someone leaking information or someone else unable to take honest feedback and this is the cost one has to bear for transparency.
3. Anonymous Feedback in AllHands - Enables everyone (even introverts) to clear out the questions in their mind.

A side note on hiring -

1. Ask candidate talk about their background for 5 mins - you’ll be surprised what you learn about the candidate.
2. Understand what ‘the best people’ mean and set standards based on that - Most people don’t understand what is a good engineer or sales or marketing person.
3. Hire from connections - even meet people in person if you need them to respond to E-Mail / LinkedIn requests.

Source Greymatter podcast with Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha

Kaushik Rangadurai

Code. Learn. Explore

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