Why We’re Only Using 1% of AI | Glean CEO Arvind Jain

0:00The technology stack is evolving at a pace like one that we've never seen before. My mindset by default is that if you build something last year, that it's got to be obsolete. There has to be a new way to do that thing better today. And if not, then it's just lack of imagination. Startups in general are a lot of hard work. There's a lot of fun. You have people who are really motivated, who are aligned on the same mission. You really love that sort of feeling of we are in this race and we're going to build a great product and we're going to win. We're going to bring customers. Being in the AI industry doesn't make it easy because this is the most brutally competitive industry that one could be in.

0:35Like there is so much change, so much competition that you don't feel like, you know, you can get off the treadmill to drink water. That's the feeling of being at the company is. But I think like, you know, it all works because we know that there's a great destination.

1:00Welcome to Grit. I'm Juven, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we have Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, the enterprise assistant and workplace search platform. Glean was actually started in the Kleiner Perkins basement. This is Arvind's second time on the show. It is incredible to see the progress that this business has made in just a few short years. A fascinating business to study and watch. Enjoy the episode. one of the things that has transpired over the last, whatever, six months or whatever, is I'm incubating a company here that I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of.

1:38Oh, cool. And thanks. And then we're growing. We're growing. And so I pinged Michael and I was like, hey, do you have space for eight or 10 people in the glean office? He's like, let me get back to you. And then he was like, no, no space. And I was like, damn it. We have it. I was like, no. Well, the office looks pretty empty to me. Okay. Yeah, we should. It's okay if not. Are you still looking? What's that? Yeah. Okay, I'll tell him. Are you going to take the downstairs? The first floor. We don't have plans, but you should come. That'll be cool to hang out. Wouldn't it be fun? Yeah, totally. I will tell him.

2:22Is there space? or is this like is this your my feeling is that there is space I don't think it's fully fully occupied the my feeling is that he may have said no because of little people okay it's like you know once you have little people like everything changes yeah so you're a big company now yeah so that's that's probably my guess is that that is the that's probably what must have happened there okay well if you think there is I didn't want to bug you with it but it would be fun hey and maybe you know get some new startup energy into into gliel yeah yeah it's nice i like it yeah and i think like it'll be yeah it'll like make things easy for you like you know we have all the all the regular stuff like lunch and everything taken care of you don't have to manage all this like you know like you can even like you know get them to just put you into the day-to-day system for all the other thank you employee needs right so i will i will tell him Like, I don't know whether the legal will, or like, so like, I guess they will tell whether they have space or not.

3:29Yeah. And whether legal will allow, or do they need to sort of like create a wall or something? Yeah, yeah. Like, market it. Yeah, yeah, okay. But what's the company about? To make a long story short, pricing models have gone crazy. So for example, you all are thinking about doing a consumption-based SKU, okay? And even before you did consumption, you were doing all of these complex deals, early renewals, expansions, multi-year, more SKUs. The underlying software that these, like your team probably came back to you and is like, Arvind, it's actually really hard to do a consumption-based SKU. And a lot of the reason why is because the software that these things were built on is not designed for a world where pricing models are so complex.

4:19Like metanome or OR. Exactly, so that's on the billing side, but even on the quoting side, like for example, your AEs, it's like very difficult. So we want to do the full stack. We're gonna start on the configure price quote, which is like basically - I love the idea, it's cool. It's just like natural language way for an AE to just say, this is exactly what I want. Natural language way for an administrator to say, hey, we introduced a new product, show me exactly what's gonna happen on the user admission testing. and then a kind of pager duty-like approval flow that has context relevant things for Michael to see something around COGS, CAC, LTV.

4:57Another thing for Deals Desk or RevOps to see, because that doesn't really exist in software today, which is insane. And obviously I come from this world and I have been dealing with it forever. So that's what we're going to start with that specific land and then we're going to go build out billing, contract lifecycle management. Very cool stuff. congrats man that's good maybe i um i'm so i'm glad to be doing this i uh maybe just selfishly you're so big time now that i i missed you and i was like well the only way i'm going to be able to hang out with arvid these days is if i uh if i come up with a good excuse so anyway it's just good to see you yeah likewise no i'm actually i i i think this is i i was here last of last week too in the office cool yeah i would love to you know i'd love to hang with you like it's uh it's It's fun.

5:44It's fun to spend time. The San Francisco office. Yeah. We, I've been hearing about that. Yeah. Since day one. Yeah. Day one, people, you've hired people from San Francisco. Yeah. You finally, what, seven years later? Yeah, six years later. Relented? Yeah. Why did you, did it break your heart? No, it didn't break my heart. It's a tough decision. And actually, like it was not so much that I was in the way of it. The main reason for us not to have an office in San Francisco for a long time was because we wanted the team to be together. And it's not, it was not like so much like, yes, I of course like the team to be together too.

6:32But our R &D team, our technical leaders, managers, even the ones who are living in San Francisco, didn't like the idea of that like people are going to be in two different offices. And like the one that you start at, like in Palo Alto, it's hard to get rid of that. That's HQ. That's HQ and has to be because all these people who came to the company, they made the decision to join Glean. Part of it was that I'm going to be working from that location. So that has to stay. So then it was always a choice of like, well, you know, do you do one more location? And I was actually very motivated. Like the thing that I used to hate the most was people from San Francisco wasting three hours.

7:11Commuting. Every day commuting. Like that's like, you know, I want all of that time to go developing systems, right? So that was the motivating factor for me. And ultimately, I think this year, I just felt that, you know, we're going to actually be going even more to the office. Now we have four days a week instead of three. And I just didn't see us, you know, me asking our team to make that track every single day. Totally. So that was the motivation. That's why we did it. How big is the company now? How many people? We crossed a thousand people. No way. Yes. That's a, I was also surprised, you know, it was not a, just to be clear, it was not a feeling of, you know, celebration.

7:55It was a feeling of panic. Why? When I saw that, you know, we passed a thousand because that's a big number. That's just so big. Yeah. But why'd you panic? What about that number? Well, I think the... Like, are you, like, if the organization's bloated or... Can you do more with less? Are you turning into a big company? Well, I mean, like, look, you hear a single person, you know, billion dollar revenue company as like the new North star for people. And so like everybody's trying to be really lean, in terms of building their companies. And we got to a thousand. And I think the, I do feel, I do feel that we have, we could be doing a lot more with our team.

8:43It's not like I'm not pointing out to individuals in our company not putting in their past. I mean, our people work hard. But when you get to that scale, to get more things done, you have to work much harder on alignment, prioritization, having clarity of what the business should be doing, and all of that like you know used to be easy like you could just walk in the room and say we're doing this and everybody heard it and now with a thousand people across like hundred different cities with our field team it's just hard to keep everybody aligned and be on the same page so when that happened when we got to a thousand that was the first emotion that I had that we got to be like really really intentional about like how we organize, you know, our team now.

9:38Because organization was not, it was not a thing on my mind. Like it was always product, technology, winning a customer, not like how we're going to organize the company. But now that's super important. And actually we still haven't done a great job. So we have to work on it. Do you enjoy that part? Isn't this kind of in some ways every founder's dream and then also every founder's nightmare, which is like you always think maybe you'll get to a size in scale where you are solving enough customer problems that you hire a thousand people, but then you get to a thousand people and you're like, oh my gosh, like, what have I created?

10:12Like, this is a battleship. I can't, you can't even move your own company. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and by the way, the things that got you, like usually the skills of a founder. Yeah. Like, I mean, you and I know each other pretty well. You are not necessarily the person that's really keen to go put in a bunch of process everywhere, right? Like that's not what you enjoy doing. Yeah, yeah. Actually, it's interesting. The, I actually get more annoyed with lack of process because lack of process like makes us do oftentimes way more work. I have to answer the same question a hundred times because we didn't like, you know, we didn't write it up and made it available to everyone so that people could do that work without having to check with me.

11:02So process is actually an important part of, I mean, like you have to, you can't be like, like, I don't like, you know, like there's no such thing as a, like I'm a cool guy. I'm a not process person. And, but I can, you know, wait and all of that. Like, you know, that's not enough. Like, you know, to build a company, you got to really, a big part of being a leader is to be able to organize, is to be able to set processes, set a way of working inside your company. But then your question was different, which is, do I enjoy it? And the answer to that is no. I know that we need it, but it's hard for me to really excel at that, to lead our team to actually be able to do these things.

11:53So that's true. I think as the company grows, one has to grow with it and force myself, for example, to really learn and adapt. And that's what I'm working hard on trying to do right now, I guess with some success, but mostly failures, but I think you learn from them. Today, every startup, every company that I talk to is like, wants to be glean, basically. Like now it's like glean for X, which has got to be both amazing, but also insane. Like even for me, I'm like, what? You know? And my general reaction is like, having seen it pretty close with you. Yeah. It's like, are you sure? Like, do you know how hard it has been to get to this point?

12:50Like, I don't think, like, even now they're like, wow, must be unbelievable being a clean. I'm like, well, the company is doing well. Yeah. But like the lived experience at clean has always been that it's not enough, you know, and, and you do that for years. Yeah. It's exhausting. Yeah. And I just wonder, like, you know, like now a thousand people, people probably come and think I'm going to go work at that, you know, that really cool, hot AI company. Yeah. And I think there is like this dissonance between the reality of what it means to work at a company like Glean, which is like, it's exhausting.

13:28Yeah. Do you feel that? I mean, it is. I mean, like startups in general are a lot of hard work. There's a lot of fun. You have people who are really motivated, who are aligned on the same mission. And as an engineer, for example, as a developer, you really love that feeling of like, you know, just we are in this race and we're going to build a great product and we're going to win, we're going to bring customers. So there's something exciting about that journey, but it's also like, it's like that, it's like being an athlete is not easy. Like you have to work very, very hard and you do get exhausted.

14:12Like people do get exhausted, like after four years, five years, the grind is not going to stop. right and and the so that's that's that's that's actually um like it's been very true for us like you know internally like is everybody's existence like are we happy are we um are we like always feeling energetic like you know it's hard like you have to sort of really uh push yourself to actually feel that way um and being in the ai industry is is not doesn't make it easy because this is the, the, the most brutally competitive industry that, that, you know, one could be in. Like there is so much change, so, so much competition, um, that you don't feel like, you know, you can get off the treadmill, you know, to drink water.

15:06Like that's sort of the, that's the, that's the feeling of like, you know, being at the company is. But I think it all works because we know that there's a great destination and we're making a big impact on that journey. And so that motivates us, that keeps us all together. And the last thing that I would say, because of this very question that you asked me, I've been always telling our our team every week or every other week, I actually tell them that this is going to be a tough, long journey. In some ways, there is no better tomorrow. Like it's going to feel, keep feeling like this, like that's what it means to be at a startup is, you know, be in the grind.

16:00And so you have to figure out something, you have to figure out something that makes today fun for you, not the tomorrow that you're hoping to arrive at. At this point, that grind has been going on for what, seven years for you? Yeah, six and a half. Six and a half years. What do you get to do? You know, like, meaning you can't leave. You can't just like go to another company. Yeah. You can't just like stop getting better. Like you can't, you can't really not learn process and abide by it. Like you have to do these things or like the company goes down and like, well, you know, what are you going to like, you can't let that happen.

16:41Right. Yeah. So I don't know, like rubric went public. You started rubric, like you've made plenty of money. Yeah. Like how do every day you wake up and you're like, I don't know, you just, you got to like get ready to go do it again and again and again for six and a half years. And there's no like end in sight. Yeah. I don't know. Like, does that treadmill get exhausting for you? It does. And I think this is where I was saying that you have to learn to make your day fun today. You know, I'm not waiting for that tomorrow where there's going to be a great outcome, you know, with Glean and we'll succeed and suddenly we'll stabilize into a business that just works and it's easy for everyone.

17:28Actually, this is like, you know, never happens to any business. Like, it doesn't matter. like how big you are, you can go public. The complexity of a business and the greater the responsibility you take at a company is going to be exhausting. It's going to be a never stopping sort of series of work and stress and all of that. So you have to just figure it out for yourself. Why are you doing it? What's important for you? What else could you be doing in that? And so for me, I know that if I don't have a problem to solve, that will be a miserable existence for me. I don't have hobbies, you know, to go travel the world.

18:14Like I would be really lost if I didn't have something to build. I have to have something to build. You think so? I think that's how it is. I mean, for me, I feel that is sort of my, fundamentally, I need work. Like every moment of my, when I'm awake, I need to be doing something. But for me, it is fun. It is fun because one, like, you know, I'm mission oriented. Like I like, you know, what we're building. I know we're adding value. I know we're changing, you know, how people work and making them more productive and making their work more fun. achieving things for them. I also really enjoy just spending time with my team.

18:59So sometimes, like, you know, and I will maybe not go into the details of it, but some conversations totally sap energy out of me and some fully energize me. And so I have to sort of make sure that my day is planned so that I'm getting a little bit of both. Like I need to get both the dosage for both of those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like you don't have a bunch of co-founders that are helping you right now? Like you have an executive team and companies started with folks, but like it's your company. There's no way around it. Does that burden weigh heavy on you? Like this company is whatever, last valuation is like 8 billion or whatever.

19:43And it doesn't seem like it's slowing down anytime soon. and Glean continues to accelerate growth and you're getting attacked from all sides. OpenAI wants to be Glean. Yeah. Flexity wants to be Glean. Everybody like wants to try and build a product like Glean. Yeah. And you have some really like hard decisions and I've had for a long time. Yeah. There is no precedent for being Glean. I'm not sure who you, even if you had other people in the company, I'm not really sure you can go to them with those decisions. There's no right answer. Yeah. Does that weigh on you or not really? I mean, it is hard to run a company.

20:32I don't know how much of that is, like running clean is extraordinarily hard compared to others. It's probably the same, I would say. Every company will have some different challenges. Like, you know, for us, the like, while, you know, we have a lot of competition that is coming up, but also we had a phase where we had no competition for many, many years. You know, in those days, you know, our problem was that we had to really evangelize and convince people that like, you know, that a product like Glean is going to actually help them, help their employees. Now, we have no convincing that is needed.

21:09Not just us, but 15 other large software companies are educating the rest of the market that you have to invest in a tool like Lean. So we have a lot of demand, but we have to compete and we have to convince customers now of a different thing, which is that we're better. And I think we are able to do that because we have more experience than anybody else in this product, in this domain. We've been at this problem the longest. So I think in some ways, what I'm saying is that opportunities, the opportunity keeps increasing for us. The challenges keep increasing for us too. And it is tough and it is hard.

21:52But I have a great team. We have people who've been there from the company from day one. My co-founders, my core part of my founding team, are executives. and we are all here to make success. And I think we will because we're focused. We are this area of search and enterprise AI platform. We are more focused than anybody else on that. And so we feel pretty good about our chances to keep succeeding. How insane is it that like the ground shifts underneath you? You're right, like for years. Yeah. We were the only game in town. Yeah. And there was a goal. Every day you chip away at that goal. Their LLMs didn't exist in the current instantiation at that point.

22:45Yeah. It was connecting your applications and then giving you visibility across everything in your enterprise. Yeah. Easy to explain, easy to understand. Yeah. The applications were all relatively consistent, you know? Yeah. Employees, you turn it on, they love it. Yeah. Nobody else was trying to do what we were doing. Yeah. Now, OpenAI is trying to do it. And new models are coming up. People are now trying to build agentic-related things on Glean. You're now competing with 100 other vertical agents. That rate of change has to be insane. You're really one of the premier AI companies. And the tax of that is that your rate of change is like higher than anything ever.

23:36Yeah. Like there's a lot of pressure on all the teams, you know, in the company. Think about R &D organization.

23:49There's always this sort of challenge, you know, when you think about building a new feature, a new component, that, well, should we do it or not? Would the LLMs just get smart enough to do these things on their own? And so we do live in this world right now with AI, where the technology is moving so fast. And it's sort of like you can't even think of that, hey, like you're building a technology moat, you're building things in a certain way, which is going to give you a lot of strength over time because things change so fast, so quickly. In fact, I think whatever you think of mode is probably liability in some ways, because you have to evolve, you have to move fast, change your product, change your technology to adapt to the new foundation, as you mentioned.

24:39So it is hard, but I think we have a good team. Our engineers are capable of working in this shifting foundation environment. And so far so good. Like, you know, I think people do love, you know, the clean product, you know, they constantly, I was just, you know, like before this, I was in a call with the largest PE firm, one of the largest PE firms in the world. And they made the same, you know, comment that like, you know, like this is search and an AI platform is a priority for us. We went with the large players and it didn't work for us. and you are already in many of our portfolio companies and they love it.

25:25And so we're excited to work with you. And so there are those moments that also happen that then sort of bring back that motivation to everyone that let's keep winning. Your comment on the moat, like the minute you think you have a moat, you're probably in trouble. Yeah. Is that because you just fundamentally aren't sure that that's possible when the LLMs are getting better so much faster? Yeah, that's part of it. the technology stack is evolving at a pace like one that we've never seen before. So like my mindset by default is that if you build something last year, that it's got to be obsolete.

26:04There has to be a new way to do that thing better today. And if not, then it's just lack of imagination. And so we, like one of the things in which I keep telling people in our R &D team is that reward building new stuff as much at the same level as throwing some stuff out of your code base. because if you're not throwing things out, it means you're sort of slowly and slowly converting into a legacy software stack. So that's an important thing. And that's why this concept of more to think differently is not the code that you wrote. What is it? Well, I mean, I think sometimes it is... Like how quickly you can remove and replace code?

27:02Well, one of them is agility, yes. So the new currency now, and well, I guess it's always been, but it's like, it's more important than ever before is how fast you can adapt, change, change your product, change your code that gives you the leverage to take advantage of the latest technology that's being built out there. then your mode is also your relationships, your customer relationships we work with the largest enterprises in the world and we are a core partner to them in their AI transformation journey and we're very clear to them that we're not actually coming with shipping great technology to you that's not going to be enough for you to drive that full impact with AI inside your enterprise.

27:57You actually need a partner. You need to work with somebody and we're going to be that partner and be on that journey with you for a long term. We'll bring the AI expertise. We'll bring the shared learnings from our other enterprise customers, but we will spend the time and we'll keep working with you. And so it's that working relationship that is also more to our customers, love how we actually come to them, how we engage with them, and how we build shared roadmaps to drive value in their businesses. Do you think that this idea of the code that you wrote a year ago is probably obsolete now? Let's extend that to most SaaS companies today.

28:41Yeah. How do you apply that to a... Are you in the camp that basically most of these traditional... legacy players, anybody that was born like 10 plus years ago is in big time trouble because they have a big customer base that for them to, they have an innovator's dilemma. Like they probably have to rewrite their stack because it's not as good as it was. They could do it way better. But in order to do that, like that's very cannibalizing to their existing business. Yeah. Is that how you think about it? Well, I think two things. One is people have talked about that there's going to be no application interfaces.

29:27There's a database behind the scenes with all their data. And then there are these modern AI experiences, which are conversational and all work happens like that. And I don't subscribe to that. I feel like there's going to be a lot of different product interfaces, different products that are going to continue. Enterprises will have probably more products rather than fewer even in the future. So I don't think if you are a SaaS product, that suddenly you become worthless, that you're not important. But that doesn't mean that you don't have a challenge. If you're a SaaS company, you cannot stay static.