Avon Puri - CIO at Rubrik

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Avon Puri, the CIO at Rubrik, and we discuss how to make tough decisions in our careers, advice on maximizing the potential of your teams, and approaching decision-making with a bias for action. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) There we go. Hello.

(Avon Puri at 00:00:35) Hello.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Where are you calling in from today?

(Avon Puri at 00:00:38) I'm in Palo Alto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Oh, I like that place.

(Avon Puri at 00:00:42) Yeah, it's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Have you been there a while?

(Avon Puri at 00:00:46) Yeah, so I've been in California for what, 21, 22 years now, out of which I worked for 14 years in Palo Alto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) What have you been doing there so long? Building the next generation of technology?

(Avon Puri at 00:01:00) That's the idea. Yeah, generally I've been involved with very kind of infrastructure-focused high-tech firms—HP, VMware, now Rubrik. So super cool stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) I've run into some really cool people over at VMware.

(Avon Puri at 00:01:17) Yeah, it's now 23,000 employees. It's a pretty big company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) How did you first get out there?

(Avon Puri at 00:01:27) So I moved here in 1999, and it just so happened—quite candidly, I wasn't thinking about anything. My wife got a job at Cisco at that time, and I used to live in New York. And we thought it would be super cool to go live in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, so we just moved here. So it's pretty straightforward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:49) Nice. So she got the job at Cisco. You came. Did you get a job at Cisco too?

(Avon Puri at 00:01:53) No, I worked for HP at that time, out of pocket. Yeah, and then I spent about a year and a half working at HP, then I went to work for a consulting firm, Big Five consulting firm. Did a lot of work back at HP as a consultant, and then ended up working at an asset management company in San Mateo and then joined VMware, spent eight years at VMware. And then I've been at Rubrik for about a year and one month now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) So what does Rubrik do?

(Avon Puri at 00:02:24) Okay, so we are basically a company pioneering the cloud data management space. And we have technology that basically gives capability to our customers to manage their data across multi-cloud. We started off with backup and providing recovery on top of backup, but as the landscape of data is getting more and more complicated across infrastructure and across multiple clouds, we are really starting to evolve more into technology that lets you manage and control your data. So that's what Rubrik does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:04) That's what we want. We want to manage and control our data.

(Avon Puri at 00:03:07) Absolutely. So it's a really exciting space, and if you look at what's playing out in this whole data governance and data management, I'm super excited for where we're heading as a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) So you said you were in New York. Did you say Manhattan, Brooklyn? What part of New York were you in?

(Avon Puri at 00:03:26) Yeah, so I lived in White Plains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) Oh, White Plains. Okay.

(Avon Puri at 00:03:30) I worked for IBM. Yep. So that's how I started my career. I used to work in, you know, it was during that interesting time when IBM was moving all their internal systems from their mainframe systems to Lotus Notes and moving into this great client-server architecture. So good fun. I was part of their Lotus Notes team. I worked in the data center, managed the servers, and all that happiness at that time. And then I ended up working for an insurance company over there—actually, the company that supplied data to other insurance companies based on which all the policies and the rates that we as consumers pay were formed. So I ended up in their web development team in the mid-nineties, and then I moved here to California to work for HP in 1998. So it's been a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:32) Nice. Were you born in White Plains?

(Avon Puri at 00:04:35) No, I was born in the UK. I grew up in India, and I moved here in 1995.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:43) So born in the UK, and then you went, like, as a small child to India and lived there. How long were you there?

(Avon Puri at 00:04:50) Yeah, I did all my education in India. It's about 20 years I was in India.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) Born in the UK, 20 years in India, and then you moved to White Plains?

(Avon Puri at 00:04:57) Then I moved to White Plains. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) Yeah, you're well-traveled.

(Avon Puri at 00:05:01) I am well-traveled, yes. We just travel quite a bit regardless of where I live, but we as a family are very fond of traveling. So we end up doing, you know, we've been to most of the continents—except for Antarctica, we've been to every single one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) You've got to go see the penguins.

(Avon Puri at 00:05:17) Oh, we've seen plenty of penguins.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:20) You've got to see the Antarctica penguins. They're very different. They've got a different attitude, different culture over there.

(Avon Puri at 00:05:25) I've been to Ushuaia, so if that counts. That's the most southern tip of South America.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:31) I heard the penguins there—their personality is a little bit cold. Oh. It's like when you have kids, you just turn into dad jokes are okay, right?

(Avon Puri at 00:05:42) You have to go there in summer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:44) That's a good time to go?

(Avon Puri at 00:05:46) Yeah, yeah. So then they're not very cold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) I was like, oh, man. Yeah, but he's actually got some really good insight here. Well, that was amazing. I love it. So do you have kids?

(Avon Puri at 00:05:58) I have kids, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) So there you go. That's why you got it.

(Avon Puri at 00:06:01) I can't believe that summer flew by so fast. You know, the kids are back in school, so we're back to the grind, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) So what do you have? Some boys, some girls? How old are they?

(Avon Puri at 00:06:12) Yeah, I have two. I have a girl who's 15, I have a boy who's nine. So I have a high schooler and an elementary schooler, so they keep us plenty busy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) Nice. I have a girl who's two and a boy who's six months.

(Avon Puri at 00:06:26) So, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) I'm in the early stage. Yeah. All right, so I want to talk a little bit about leadership and what you've learned as you went from these different positions from, you know, New York as an individual contributor on a team to team lead. What are some of the first takeaways that you've gotten making that transition?

(Avon Puri at 00:06:48) Yeah, so I think there are a couple of ways to look at it, right? Generally, my transition—and I can talk about my story—generally what has happened is that when I started, I'm a fairly hands-on person. I grew up writing code. I was talking to you about the insurance company I worked for. And in 1996 or '97, we were basically taking all the insurance data that was sitting in documents, and we were basically making it available online using the Internet to all our customers. And this was during those times when newscasters were explaining on the news what the Internet means and what an AOL account or what your email account is. So basically, my whole career has been fueled by—I don't shy away from just experimenting with stuff, and especially technology that helps business and brings better business outcomes. I am actually very fond of going behind it. And that has helped me propel through the career as I've gone from developer to team lead to manager to senior manager to director. So I've gone through the whole ranks. I didn't bypass any layers across various companies to come to the point where I am today. So generally, I feel that unless you know what you're doing, unless you basically have done stuff with your own hands, it's really difficult to really direct the team and direct the strategy on where you want to take it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) Yes. If you hear me typing, I'm taking notes because what you say sounds fantastic. Right? That's a good point. Right? Because we see people, they do workshops or courses, and you know, check a box or take a test, and they get a certificate that says they're a leader. But then when you have to actually apply the knowledge and go through that time and gain that experience, right, to actually improve.

(Avon Puri at 00:08:57) Yeah, no. I'll tell you, having an experience to basically navigate a situation—you only realize that when you are in that situation. And, you know, I'll tell you right now, I have had an opportunity to work for some really big corporations. I've led really big teams, and I've managed significant amounts of dollars from a budget perspective. Now I've come to Rubrik where we as a company are fairly early in our journey, if you compare to my previous companies. The best privilege I've had here is to really set up the infrastructure from scratch. And all the experience I've had in looking at how the companies operate when they are six, eight, ten billion dollars in revenue, I've had an opportunity to bring it here at Rubrik, and we are setting our infrastructure in a way that basically sets up really well to scale without making a lot of changes. You know, otherwise, if you see what happens with companies is that they grow up so fast, they don't invest correctly in their infrastructure. And then once they go public and they have to declare results and make sure that all their financial systems are pristine and they have all the right controls, then they realize that, oh, we have to practically go back and redo all the implementations again. So some of the value of experience we are bringing here—I have a very experienced team. I've got people who've been doing this for a while, and we are bringing all the experience here at Rubrik to set up the infrastructure so that as a company, we can scale. And infrastructure is not a reason because of which the company didn't grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:48) Right. You want to solve that. You own that. Make sure you have everything set up for success as you expand. So give me some context real quick. What is the size of Rubrik?

(Avon Puri at 00:10:58) Yeah, so we are almost 1,600 people now. We are a private company, so I can't share numbers from revenue and dollars, but we are growing really fast. Just to give you context, when I interviewed here in March, April last year, we were about 900 employees. And now we are sitting at about 1,600, so you can see the speed at which we are growing. Also, if you look at our revenues, we deliver technology and software in particular. If you look at it, it's not that easy because you can sell software in many ways. If you look at what are the various business models, you can sell perpetual, you can sell subscription, you can sell hybrid. So it's really not that straightforward to just set up a simple infrastructure, especially if you sell perpetual as well as subscription. So the point I'm trying to make here is that it might seem that we are a smaller company, 1,600 people, but our business is fairly complicated. We basically sell through partner channels. We try to support customers with the way they want to buy software from us. So for us on the infrastructure side, when we're setting up business processes and setting up systems, it can get slightly complicated. So that's the context of the role and why it is pretty challenging.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) I can imagine. Because, like, here we do leadership development, right? That's one of our services that we do. We do our podcast, and then we do workshops or talks that I give around the world. And for every one of those, we've got this binder, this operations binder where we have how we prospect, the needs, the calls that we do, the sale—there's an entire business for each product that you have, each way people can transact with you.

(Avon Puri at 00:13:08) Exactly, right? So it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:10) It's amplified for you, though.

(Avon Puri at 00:13:12) It is, it is. And then when you're growing really fast as a company, then the other challenge lies in how do you continue to support business without slowing them down and then really providing the platform for the company to continue to scale. So literally, you know, this analogy has been used a million times—literally laying down the tracks when the train's coming 100 miles an hour. That's kind of the fun part of the job, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:40) I love it. I think in a hundred years, there will be some variation to that analogy where it's like Elon Musk's tunnels or something. It's like laying down the Hyperloops when it's coming.

(Avon Puri at 00:13:50) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) So I'm always looking to bring value and hook you guys up, do whatever I can to help. Who's your ideal customer? I know you have a lot of them. As you mentioned, you have different types of products, but maybe someone's listening right now. What's your ideal customer profile?

(Avon Puri at 00:14:05) Yeah, so I think our product would be really useful to a company that operates at good scale. It's an enterprise-scale customer. Generally, they have data sitting in your private data center or data centers. Also, you start to use multiple clouds or you're looking to start to embark on your cloud journey. And you really want to kind of get control of your data across wherever it is sitting and get visibility and start to manage that data. So that is an ideal customer for us. We as a company not only provide a platform that basically lets you manage your data in cloud and your private data centers, but also we provide services that sit on top of that platform, like ransomware detection and fixing. And then we're just going, we've just announced a product for data classification and governance. So if you're a CIO in a company, some of the stuff we do is going to be very high interest to you because we are trying to solve the problems which really haven't been solved in totality across the board.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:29) All right, so I'm following it. I like it. There's a lot of people that listen to this that match that customer profile. But I'm curious about, like, Rubrik on Rubrik, right? Do you—we had Archana, who's the CIO or CTO of Atlassian, because we did a special episode where we had the CIO of Atlassian and the CTO.

(Avon Puri at 00:15:49) So she—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:49) Had a cool way of wording it. Instead of saying, like, dog-fooding your own product, she had it as, like, drinking your own champagne.

(Avon Puri at 00:15:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:56) Way classier, right?

(Avon Puri at 00:15:58) Yeah. Well, you know, people use different variations. You know, we can call it either way. I think the bottom line here is that we are running our infrastructure using our own product. It's a very critical piece of capability that we enable using Rubrik within our company.

(Avon Puri at 00:16:21) Right? So we have hundreds of developers, you know, spread across various geographies. And the speed at which we deliver our features and deliver our product—it is really critical that the infrastructure stays up. If, God forbid, something happens, we have the ability to restore the environment and get the developers productive ASAP.

(Avon Puri at 00:16:45) So we use Rubrik for all those capabilities. We take all our core engineering infrastructure, basically, back it up using Rubrik, restore it using Rubrik. Almost between 1,500 VMs that are backed up and, you know, terabytes and terabytes of data. All their configurations, the parameters, all our core IT infrastructure—everything is backed up and restored using Rubrik today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:16) I like it. It sounds like it simplifies and brings everything together. So I actually have an idea for your marketing team. Can I throw this out there?

(Avon Puri at 00:17:24) You can. You can hate it. You can say it's horrible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:24) All right. You take a Rubik's Cube, right? And you mess it all up so it's all jumbled. All the colors are everywhere. And you say, like, "This is your data without Rubrik." And then you take a Rubik's Cube that's solved so it's clean on all the sides, and you show the solved one on the other side. You say, "This is your data with Rubrik." Yeah. Boom. It's like chaos and simplicity.

(Avon Puri at 00:17:43) I think you should be in marketing, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47) Right? I love it. I don't know. When people talk, like, when you describe, this stuff just pops in my head. And I'm like, okay, this is what we should do.

(Avon Puri at 00:17:53) Maybe you're in the wrong profession.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:55) Maybe I am. All right. Let's cut the podcast. No. But I've shared some of the ideas, and I've actually gotten offered a job on the show before for marketing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:06) Yeah. I like it. So all right, let's get to it. So you use your own product. That's how you know it works. As you're rapidly expanding—900, 1,600, you're going to be at, you know, 3,200 shortly, right? As you're rapidly expanding, you're using it, and so that's how you keep really close to that product.

(Avon Puri at 00:18:23) Correct. And then, generally, more and more—and, again, this is something to do with how we are evolving as an organization. You know, the company grew so fast. I, you can say that I was literally the first IT employee in the company, right, when I was hired in. And we basically formed the whole department from scratch. Okay?

(Avon Puri at 00:18:47) And what has happened is that over a period of time, you know, first order of business was to make sure that we have all the right systems in place, we have all the right mechanisms in place so that we can run the business, we can continue to give a platform for growth, et cetera. Now we are at the point where we're also becoming a very integral part of the supply chain of the product before it's released. So, you know, all the new set of products which we just announced last week, my team's been testing it. We've been part of the beta program. We have given feedback.

(Avon Puri at 00:19:23) We have also plugged in with the product management before the release is locked in. You know, we can give them our thought process on what's critical, what's not critical. So there are some definite advantages of being a kind of representative customer in the company. So, essentially, we become super critical for various functions across the board. So there's definitely more than just running critical infrastructure on our own product, but also how do we give feedback to product managers, how do we really run the product in our production setting before it goes out so that we find some defects before our customers find them and things like that. So, you know, really excited on some of the work we are doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:08) No. That's a good point. We recently had—hasn't aired yet, but we had on, earlier this week, one of the original engineers at Facebook. And they were talking about moving fast and breaking things, but the interesting part he brought up was, he goes, like, out of context, that sounds one way. He goes, but what that means is that we are really good at fixing things and then creating environments where, like, you can only break it in a controlled environment.

(Avon Puri at 00:20:33) Right. Right. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) So you can move fast and break things, but that doesn't mean you're deploying to the entire network.

(Avon Puri at 00:20:38) Yeah. See, the thing is that, you know, the reality of life is our product is complicated. Right? And, you know, you can imagine that things will break. So for us, the opportunity is to really have an infrastructure that's resilient, and we have the ability to really get developers up and running fast.

(Avon Puri at 00:21:01) If, God forbid, something happened—let's say our storage went down or something happened—then, you know, what Rubrik gives to us as an organization is the ability to just get these guys up and running really quickly and get them going back to what they need to be doing. So that's a definite advantage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19) So we talked a little bit about the product, about the process and the infrastructure and the growth. Let's talk a little bit about the culture. What's it like to be on a team at Rubrik?

(Avon Puri at 00:21:28) Yeah. So I would say that for me coming from bigger organizations, coming into a relatively smaller org was a big change, but a very welcoming change. And there are a few things which I love. Right? You know, first of all, we are all focused on providing value to our customers, so getting really good products out there which solve critical business problems.

(Avon Puri at 00:21:56) So we have a, you know, completely no BS type of culture. Right? It's very—we don't have offices. We don't have cubes. You know? Everybody sits together. Our CEO sits right across from me. You know, everybody's very approachable. So it's a very open culture and just to the point to get work done, which I really, really like and, you know, this has been one of the big highlights for me. So as a company, we invite all our employees to our board meetings.

(Avon Puri at 00:22:26) So this is one of the big things our CEO brought in. You know, he wanted to make sure that all the discussions are open and all our employees are in on what's going on. So if you look at the culture of the organization, you know, we are all rooted in velocity and transparency and then, other, you know—of course, integrity and relentlessness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) I like the relentlessness. I mean, I like all of them. Right? But the transparency one—that's, I think that's great. I've actually never heard of a company doing that before, so that's really interesting.

(Avon Puri at 00:23:04) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:04) And—

(Avon Puri at 00:23:04) So if you look up our company, that's one of the core values. And it, you know, this also really makes sure that employees are very aware of what's going on. There's nothing hidden here. Right? You know? So people know what issues are. People know, you know, they're celebrating successes together, and then also know what they need to be working on. So it's a really interesting, you know, experiment for me. I've never seen this before in my past life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:34) Have you seen that, like, this culture being so clearly defined and being out there, does that attract other people that have those similar values to your company?

(Avon Puri at 00:23:45) Yeah. Definitely. I think this is one of the core—you know, when we go through the interview process, this is one of the things I've seen that people really like the fact that, you know, the company's not trying to pull a fast one on you and, you know, it's open, transparent communication on what's going on. So it's definitely one of the core values that attracts employees coming to Rubrik.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:10) So we get some questions from the audience. Right? And they ask us to ask—you know, when we come across great leaders like you, they say, you know, ask some of these questions, get their insight. And so sometimes, because, you know, sometimes they're really exact, sometimes they're a little bit ambiguous, but I'm going to throw a couple at you and you just speak to them however you'd like. Is that okay?

(Avon Puri at 00:24:29) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) All right. So they want to know just general advice on decision making. Like, you have tough decisions or easy—like, how do you approach decision making in general?

(Avon Puri at 00:24:39) Yeah. So I have a strong philosophy, and this is something I've learned through my career as well. I feel that a bad decision is better than indecision. Right? I think if you make a bad decision, and sometimes they're horrible decisions, then, you know, I'm pretty sure if you make horrible decisions again and again, then you won't have the job.

(Avon Puri at 00:25:00) But, you know, if you make a bad decision, you can at least recover from it, do something with it. The problem with indecision is that it basically confuses the hell out of the team. You know, it doesn't give them any direction. So my general philosophy has been, you know, I have a bias for action. Right? You know? So let's go do something. Let's make the best decision we have on the data that is available. Let's make sure that you've looked at all sorts of pros and cons, and you've just mulled over what's the right approach, how do you take this forward. But don't take, like, weeks or months so that basically everybody is waiting for you to make a decision.

(Avon Puri at 00:25:40) So make a quick decision and then follow what does that mean and what are the repercussions and then the ability to revert your decision back if it needs to be done as fast as possible. So I follow that approach. You know, this is one of the feedbacks I get—that one of the big things we've been able to bring to the organization is that there's clear direction on where we are heading. Right? And then, you know, there's no ambiguity one way or the other, and I think that helps the team quite a bit in going forward.

(Avon Puri at 00:26:15) So that's my philosophy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) I like it. I really do. And I haven't heard exactly that advice before, and so I was taking notes. I really like it. So the next question is about, you know, how do you get the most out of your teams? Right? Like, how do you approach this act of improving your people and making sure that, you know, they live up to their potential?

(Avon Puri at 00:26:40) Yeah. So I think, generally, what I feel is that the best way people produce is two ways. One is if they are the right people for the right job. Right? That's, you know, you have the right person. The second thing is that you have an organization that is set for success. And everybody has different philosophies on how to set up an organization. I also think that there is no such thing as a perfect organizational structure because if there was one, everybody would have one. But, you know, you basically based on your context and, you know, what's going on in the company, you set up the organization. I typically set up orgs with functional responsibilities with a single neck to choke structure.

(Avon Puri at 00:27:31) So, you know, I can give you the way we are structured here in Rubrik in my organization. I have five big responsibilities within the company which I drive. Right? Five big goals. First one is setting up business applications infrastructure that basically enables all the business processes and gets the company going on a march to a billion dollar plus revenue.

(Avon Puri at 00:27:55) These are things like order to cash and, you know, procure to pay and, you know, leads to opportunities, all your core business processes. So I have a leader who's responsible for that one area. The second big component for us is that when I came in, one of the big charters given to me was, let's take Rubrik and let's be a data-driven company. That we don't want to make decisions which are just, you know, you don't have enough data to make decisions on. So we invested early on in our data warehouse, and, you know, we set up the whole business intelligence mechanisms on top of it.

(Avon Puri at 00:28:35) So I have a team that looks after all the data management in the company. Then the third component for me is the technical infrastructure, the tech ops teams. So we have a responsibility for making sure that all the network, compute, data centers, public cloud, storage, end-to-end orchestration—that's all humming and, you know, we're not seeing any network issues or, you know, compute's down every second day. Our data center is not up. So, you know, I have a team that's responsible for all the technical operations for the company across the board.

(Avon Puri at 00:29:07) And then fourth one is security posture. So I have a CISO as part of my team, and she's responsible for looking after, you know, all our security components that—we as a company are not vulnerable to security attacks, et cetera. And then last but not least is Rubrik on Rubrik and what we do with our own product usage. So I have a person who's responsible for Rubrik on Rubrik, and she also does some other stuff. But, primarily, you know, that's her role.

(Avon Puri at 00:29:39) So that's how my org is laid out. Everybody has a clear and, you know, end-to-end responsibility for what they need to do. There is, of course, you know, you have to—they will have to work with each other, but there are clear goals and metrics everybody's got, you know, for them to manage, and that basically enables them to be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) I love it. Yeah. Because if they know the metric—one of the important parts that I've learned personally, like, over the past year or two with metrics, is that the clearly defined metrics allow you to feel that sense of "I did a good day's work." It's less about, like, control over the individual. It's not a negative thing at all. It's like, "Here is the recipe for you to do your best work." And yeah.

(Avon Puri at 00:30:26) So think about it this way. Right? You're driving a car, and unless your speedometer tells you how fast you're driving, there's no way for you to tell. So I have a fairly large scope from an organizational perspective, you know, what I just went through with you. If I don't get a sense of, okay, what is our throughput on the features we are pushing? If we, you know, what is the uptime metrics for our network, storage, compute, data center? You know, how's our VPN performing? You know, looking at how many number of security incidents we have.

(Avon Puri at 00:31:13) So for leaders who have bigger organizations, the only way you can run your business is by looking at, you know, what is your current speed? Right? You know, what is going on in the organization? And, you know, so that's the only way I can see that you can run an organization and effectively manage the work out of them. Otherwise, I would be in their shoes on a daily basis trying to figure out, "Hey, you know, did we have any incident today?" There's nothing you can do. So that's why just running your business, metrics are so important for us across the board.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:38) Okay. So the last audience-related question is, how do you approach growing and mentoring your teams?

(Avon Puri at 00:31:45) Yes. So I think that the mentoring starts with two components. One is that you put right people in the right role, as I said earlier. Right? So making sure that they are set up for success, they have all the right resources.

(Avon Puri at 00:31:59) You know, what they are expected to deliver is in line with what company is asking for, and then you have the means to be able to support those. Right? But mentoring to me—and I've actually had, you know, really good fortune that I've been mentored by some very good leaders, you know, some very big leaders in industry. And what I felt was that, you know, I didn't need a whole lot of help in the technical side of the house. You know?

(Avon Puri at 00:32:31) So this is something you grew up with and you know technology. The mentorship is more about rounding you out as a person. Right? So giving you advice on, you know, more softer skills and, you know, making you a better leader. Right?

(Avon Puri at 00:32:47) And so, generally, you know, that's how I work with my teams as well to make sure that, you know, giving them advice on—okay, technically, we are great, but this is how we should position it. This is how we should really structure this conversation. What are the pros and cons. And so, you know, we are looking at all angles from what makes sense for the company.

(Avon Puri at 00:33:11) So I benefit tremendously, and, you know, I have a very strong personality, and I was given this feedback early on that if I have to grow in the organization, I really need to make sure that I have that kind of, you know, quote unquote presidential personality, for lack of better word. So I think that since I've benefited significantly from this advice, I try to work with my team and folks even below my direct reports to see if we can, you know, somehow figure out—have a more rounded team than more kind of strong technical and, you know, not so presidential team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:55) You want to improve and grow your team as leaders. Right?

(Avon Puri at 00:33:57) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) I love it. That's what we're—

(Avon Puri at 00:33:59) It's all about rounding out as a leader, as you know, your personality rather than just being, like, one trick pony and all you know is you're the best technical person on the team, but, you know, nobody wants to work with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:12) Right. You don't want to be that person.

(Avon Puri at 00:34:13) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) Definitely don't. You're not going to get very far. The team's not going to do well. Yeah. But I like that. Yeah. It's important to make sure that you're not just one trick. Right? That you have—you know, we've noticed because we do have the leadership company here. And what we've noticed recently—and it's just on top of my mind because I was talking to investors yesterday—is that there's a shift in terminology from people calling it soft skills to core skills.

(Avon Puri at 00:34:38) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) Because the logic behind it was, in the article I was reading, was that the soft skills sound like optional or nice to have.

(Avon Puri at 00:34:47) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:47) And a lot of these skills, like communication, that is not an optional or nice to have skill. Like, that is a core skill that you need as an individual.

(Avon Puri at 00:34:56) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) That was just something I was hearing about yesterday. Because, you know, people—I found that people don't love the idea of working on soft skills.

(Avon Puri at 00:35:04) But it's so necessary. Right? So, ultimately, you have to work with people. And everybody has a different way of looking at the same problem, and that's why we are a team and teams have to be successful. So I think that having that ability to relate, having that ability to understand what other person's coming from, and then have a really good way of articulating your point of view and making sure that there's a good agreement on what's the best way forward. You know, that's a really critical skill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) See, I love hearing this stuff. Like, I like hearing it. It's—I like when I hear great advice and you can just tell because you know that, like, if I'm in your town and I visit, I have a good idea of, like, what your team would be like. Right? Culture and so—I like to say good job. And I know nobody walks up to you and says that regularly.

(Avon Puri at 00:35:54) No, I'm sorry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) I'll come in later. Yeah.

(Avon Puri at 00:35:56) But part of it is I think that the company fosters this culture a little bit in having, you know, the way the teams are set up and the tone's always set from the top. Right? You know, if you really follow the advice, this is how the company operates at the end of the day. So it's really good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) Well, that's why you're growing, and that's why you'll continue to be successful and get larger. So I love it. Now let's give you a plug real quick. Right? So for engineers or for individuals, leaders that are listening to this and they're interested, they like the culture, and they want to learn more about careers at Rubrik or reach out to you, what would be the best way to do that?

(Avon Puri at 00:36:34) Yeah. I think they should go to our website. There, you know, at any times, we have multiple positions posted. We're always looking for good people, so, you know, definitely reach out directly. You know, if somebody wants to reach out to me directly, feel free to connect on LinkedIn. I'm fairly, you know, active on social media. I don't tweet as much. I'd like to tweet, but LinkedIn, I check regularly. And then I'll be able to send them in the right direction wherever they need to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) What should they search on LinkedIn?

(Avon Puri at 00:37:11) Just search for my name, Avon Puri. So a couple of ways—so you could look for the company. So Rubrik has a fairly good presence across all social media channels. And then if you want to link directly with me, just look me up, Avon Puri, A-V-O-N. Last name is P-U-R-I. And I don't think there are too many of us with that name, so I'll probably be the one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) I love it. That's good. It's a good name too. It's very easy to pronounce, and it's very clear, and it's succinct. You got a good name.

(Avon Puri at 00:37:42) Yeah. There's a little bit of a bridge tangent to this. I was born on the banks of River Avon, so let's put it this way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:51) Oh, there you go. My daughter's name is Aria, and everyone always asks us about the hotel in Vegas. And I'm like, no. No. No. No. No. It's after the musical part of a movement, an aria. And I was like, because we like music. So as we wrap up here, what are you, like, most excited about today? Like, what are you jumping out of bed for in the morning?

(Avon Puri at 00:38:10) Yeah. So, as I said earlier, right, I think the biggest thing which I like to do is, you know, taking technology and really get business value out of it. And, you know, recently, if you look at the world, right, there's really good stuff going on. Quite candidly, I feel that technology is getting invented faster than humans can consume it. So especially for us, you know, folks who are in the business world in CIO or IT roles, we just have to really watch out on how fast you want to send technology to your users. Are they ready to embrace it fully before you send them the next version? But I feel that in a couple of areas, especially what's going on in AI, ML fields, I think has a really good business applicability. And then, of course, you know, what's happening with infrastructure as a service, especially as the world grows into more multi-cloud architecture. I think there's a lot of values and a lot of options that can open up as we continue to go down that path. You know, we at Rubrik are actually, you know, of course from the product perspective, we are using AI ML as part of our product. Like in ransomware detection, all our capabilities are built on top of AI ML algorithms. Also from kind of more business technology perspective, we already have service in the beta where we are starting to move service or support for our customers from more reactive to proactive, starting to predict when customers are going to run out of, you know, space on their clusters and, you know, start to really turn the conversation a little bit, you know, more from us as a company, giving them information rather than waiting for them to reach out to us. We're looking at, okay, how do we make our sales a little bit more productive with giving them information based on where the work's going to be or where opportunities are going to be rather than waiting for opportunity to pop up. So some really good interesting stuff going on in that world I'm very excited about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:24) Right. Yeah. You got me excited. I'm all pumped up about it too now. So as we wrap up here, last question, I'm going to run a hypothetical situation for you. Is that okay? We're going to have fun with it. Alright. So you and I both get tickets. Right? Both get tickets to go see the first ever Hyperloop.

(Avon Puri at 00:40:43) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:43) So we get tickets. We fly out there, but the address is wrong, and it's actually Elon Musk Private Residence.

(Avon Puri at 00:40:51) Okay. Where are you going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:52) Yeah. We're excited. You and I show up, we're like, what's going on? But there's the new Tesla 2020. We got to go inside and check that out. So we go into his living room and there he is. He's got this curtain that he pulls back and there's a time machine. Right? Now here's the thing, it's fixed to the exact moment when you're flying from India to Great Plains. Right? Like, when you're coming over here. And you get to jump into that airplane real quick and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

(Avon Puri at 00:41:21) I think for me, for my particular career, I jumped into kind of bigger companies, bigger corporations too early on in my career. I had an opportunity to go work for a much smaller company in mid-nineties and, you know, it was a 50 people company at that time that became much bigger. I think that I would have really gotten a lot of benefit if I'd started, if I'd worked for a smaller company before I jumped into a bigger company. So I compensated for it. I did some consulting work that gave me a lot broader exposure later. But I think that if I have to give any advice, right, first fixing my own career, if, you know, other people who are kind of at early stages of their career, I would say if you get an opportunity into more smaller companies at the start of your career, I would rather go do that than just pick a job in a bigger corporation where your scope is fairly well defined and you're only going to stretch so much. You know, that would help people's career. And if somebody comes and asks for advice from me, that's definitely what I tell people coming out of college today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) Yeah. It's, again, a nice variety. Get to experience. Yeah. I like it. That is fantastic advice. Thank you so much. I appreciate this. We did it. We made a podcast. It's done.

(Avon Puri at 00:42:45) Great. I look forward to the product when it comes out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Have a fantastic day, my friend.

(Avon Puri at 00:42:51) Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) Talk soon. Bye bye.