From Google to $16B IPO: Rubrik's PMF Playbook

Soham Mazumdar quit Google, failed at one startup, then co-founded Rubrik — hitting $1M ARR in two quarters selling enterprise hardware before growing to a $16B public company. Now building WisdomAI, he breaks down exactly what real product-market fit feels like from the inside.

Key Facts

• Time to $1M ARR: ~2 quarters of active selling (Soham Mazumdar)
• Net Revenue Retention at IPO: 130%+ (Soham Mazumdar)
• Churn rate: Sub-1% (Soham Mazumdar)
• Market cap at time of recording: $16 billion (2x+ since IPO) (Pablo Srugo)
• WisdomAI seed round: $15 million (Soham Mazumdar)

Why Rubrik Found Product-Market Fit So Fast

Rubrik succeeded by targeting a massive, unglamorous problem — enterprise data backup — that Silicon Valley had ignored. Enterprises were desperate to modernize but trapped by fragile legacy software. That latent demand, combined with real budgets, created instant traction once a credible solution existed.

The founding insight behind Rubrik was deceptively simple: take the software architecture that Google, Amazon, and Facebook had perfected inside their hyperscale data centers and bring it to ordinary enterprise IT. Most companies were still following a 'buy bigger hardware' philosophy that was both expensive and brittle. Rubrik offered a scale-out, software-defined approach that let customers start small and grow.

Critically, the problem wasn't one Rubrik had to manufacture demand for. According to Soham, a Gartner study at the time found that roughly sixty percent of enterprises were willing to replace their backup software within three years. The solutions were so bad that customers were already primed to switch — Rubrik just had to show up with something better. As Soham put it, 'We were able to capture a ton of latent demand that people had for change. A lot of dollars here, a lot of demand, but for some reason it was flying under the radar in Silicon Valley.'

"Unlike many other things, what Rubrik started off solving was a very unsexy problem. You know, Silicon Valley startups were not going after unsexy problems. In that sense, we were able to capture a ton of latent demand." — Soham Mazumdar

"They wanted to change, they didn't know how to, they had the budgets. That was another great thing — anytime you have data, data has gravity and data also tends to have budgets." — Soham Mazumdar

• Legacy backup software was fragile, expensive to maintain, and slow to recover from ransomware
• Enterprises wanted cloud migration but lacked a path to get there
• The scale-out architecture let customers start small — lowering the initial sales barrier
• Nobody in Silicon Valley was chasing this 'unsexy' category

Why Rubrik Always Charged for Pilots

Rubrik never ran free trials. Every pilot was a paid engagement — typically around $60K. The rationale: deploying enterprise hardware takes real effort from both sides, and paid pilots ensure the customer is genuinely committed, not just kicking tires.

For SaaS founders used to free trials and self-serve onboarding, Rubrik's approach feels counterintuitive. But Soham is clear on why charging from the first conversation was non-negotiable: 'We always did paid pilots at Rubrik. The rationale was that you want some skin in the game. There is this data center hardware component — it's a lot of effort to get a POC going. If you're not at all vested in it, you know, this was not just press a button and a trial starts. This was a significant amount of effort on the customer's part as well.'

Those early paid pilots were not large deals — typically $60K — but they established a commercial relationship from the start and filtered out low-intent buyers. More importantly, paid customers gave higher-quality feedback. When someone has spent money on something, they have a stake in making it work, and their pain points are real. This is how Rubrik got the dense, honest feedback loops that shaped the product in its first year of selling.

"We always did paid pilots at Rubrik. The rationale was that you want some skin in the game. This was a significant amount of effort on the customer's part as well. So we want to make sure that there was skin in the game." — Soham Mazumdar

"Early customers, they tend to kind of root for you. They feel great about making you successful. So they kind of take a lot of pain. Because early products are like terrible." — Soham Mazumdar

The Go-To-Market Playbook: DeLoreans and Evangelists

Rubrik's early GTM combined aggressive outbound, industry conference presence — including a famous DeLorean stunt at VMworld — and hiring a top industry evangelist. The goal was brand awareness in a market where nobody had heard of them yet.

Once Rubrik had early customer proof points, the team went all-in on awareness. VMworld, the massive enterprise virtualization conference, became a centerpiece. Rubrik bought a premium booth and brought a DeLorean — the Back to the Future car with gull-wing doors — to the show floor. 'I remember there were long lines of people trying to get a picture with the DeLorean machine. That was brand building,' Soham recalls. 'For a few years, we were known as the DeLorean company.'

But brand stunts alone don't close enterprise deals. Rubrik also hired Chris Wall, one of the most respected independent voices in the VMware ecosystem, as a key evangelist. He helped translate Rubrik's technical value proposition to IT buyers and Gartner analysts who needed educating. 'You had to bring them along,' Soham says. 'You're telling me what I used to talk about earlier doesn't make sense? But you have to bring them along.' Getting analysts excited was essential to unlocking larger enterprise accounts.

The first customer — a small hardware retailer in New South Wales, Australia called Lang's Building Supplies — was found through a conference introduction. The CTO was an enthusiast who said yes before the product was fully stable. Rubrik's first sales engineer flew to Australia with 70 pounds of hardware to make the deployment happen.

"Evangelism was a huge deal. One of our key early hires was a person who was one of the top evangelists in the VMware ecosystem. He was crucial to building up our brand and making people understand our value proposition." — Soham Mazumdar

"For a few years, we were like known as the company — oh, the DeLorean company." — Soham Mazumdar

Customer Feedback Is the Only Real PMF Signal

Soham is direct: industry reports, VC pitch decks, and market trends are useful background, but they tell you nothing about PMF. The only real signal is a paying customer enduring a broken product because the pain it solves is that acute.

Having lived through one startup that built impressive technology nobody paid for — Tactile, a mobile payments company — Soham is unambiguous about what PMF actually feels like. With Rubrik, it was unmistakable within the first five customer conversations. People were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for software that was, by his own admission, not ready.

'When you pitch to VCs, you have industry reports and, oh look, this trend happening here, there — all of that is nice,' Soham says. 'But there is only one thing. Which is rubber meeting the road. Which is the customer feedback. Otherwise, there is no PMF.' The contrast with his first startup was stark: great technology, zero customer pull.

This is also why Soham emphasizes taking extraordinary care of early customers. Their feedback is the product roadmap. Their tolerance for pain is the runway. And their eventual success stories become your sales reference calls.

"There is only one thing. Which is rubber meeting the road. Which is the customer feedback. Otherwise, there is no PMF." — Soham Mazumdar

"After first five customer conversations, to me it became very real. These guys are willing to pay so much money for this thing that barely works. Once you kind of learn the level of pain your customers are facing and are willing to kind of go through — that gives you a lot of validation that you're onto something." — Soham Mazumdar

WisdomAI: Building in a Crowded AI Market

After eight years at Rubrik, Soham launched WisdomAI — an enterprise data analytics platform powered by conversational AI. The core challenge is accuracy: business data requires exact answers, not approximate ones. Early signs include Fortune 500 customers and strong user expansion within accounts.

The ChatGPT moment in late 2022 crystallized something Soham had been circling for years: enterprise data is deeply underserved by analytics tools built for specialists. Tools like Tableau or Looker are, in his analogy, 'the Photoshop of analytics' — powerful but inaccessible to anyone without training. WisdomAI's bet is that conversational AI can democratize analytics for every employee, not just data teams.

The hardest technical problem isn't the chat interface — it's accuracy. 'When you say, tell me how revenue is going, it turns out revenue is a piece of math that needs to be done with a great amount of precision. You cannot make up a number. Don't hallucinate,' Soham explains. Every organization calculates revenue differently, stores data differently, and uses different terminology. Building a system that understands those bespoke semantics without hallucinating took roughly a year of engineering.

The market contrast with Rubrik is instructive. Rubrik owned an ignored category. WisdomAI is competing in one of the hottest spaces in tech. 'One of the things that Rubrik got right was picking an ignored problem — when you ignore a problem, you get to be the only person kind of doing it. We don't have that,' Soham admits. The upside: Fortune 500 companies are far more receptive to AI pitches in 2025 than they were to backup modernization pitches in 2014.

"If there is one moment in the history of technology where there is a quantum jump in terms of what you could do — this was the moment. And this problem was kind of very close to me." — Soham Mazumdar

"One of the things that Rubrik got right was picking an ignored problem. When you ignore a problem, you get to be the only person kind of doing it. We don't have that." — Soham Mazumdar

Advice for Early-Stage Founders

Soham's top three pieces of advice: think from first principles on GTM (don't copy others), don't overbuild before validating, and don't let critics stop you. Most people who offer skeptical feedback have never built what you're building.

After three startups and an IPO, Soham's advice to founders is grounded in lived experience rather than theory. His first principle: every company's go-to-market is different. 'Rubrik GTM, not the same as Wisdom GTM, not the same as Glean GTM,' he says. Copying another company's playbook without understanding why it worked is one of the most common mistakes he sees.

His second: engineers tend to overbuild. The bias toward building more features before talking to customers delays the feedback loops that actually tell you what to build. And his third is the most personal: 'Don't be detracted. You have decided to do this. Go ahead with it and it's going to be okay. There are many paths to being great. Many of them go through failures, but so what?'

"Don't be detracted. You have decided to do this. Go ahead with it and it's going to be okay. There are many paths to being great. Many of them go through failures, but so what? You just got it." — Soham Mazumdar

"One year of a startup is like easily ten years of a Google. That's a very, very special atmosphere to be in." — Soham Mazumdar

• Apply first-principles thinking to GTM — don't copy another company's playbook
• Avoid the engineer trap of overbuilding before getting customer feedback
• Don't let skeptics derail you — most have never built what you're building
• Startup failures are learning accelerants: one year of startup equals ten years at a big company

Rubrik vs. WisdomAI: Founding Context Compared