Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you started to get this thing off the ground, anecdotally and structurally, what were the next steps?

Andrew Rubin: PJ and I probably first had to figure out whether or not we like each other enough to spend more time together. I know that sounds silly now in hindsight, but when you meet somebody for the first time, you literally consider tethering the most important investment of your life to somebody else. You want to make sure you like the person.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely vital.

Andrew Rubin: I would agree with you entirely, but I think sometimes that may get overlooked. You certainly want to believe and trust the person not just in their ability but also in their desire to make it happen the same way that you do. There was a period of time when we chatted by phone and email late into the night. We spent time together in person. What we realized was that those things came very easily for us. Once we got that off the table, then it moved into a tactical exercise of how to write a business plan, how to present the idea of what it is we want to build, and probably the most tactical piece of the exercise — how do you get funded to start the company.

Sramana Mitra: What is it about him that convinced you, one way to put it would be, to get married to him?

Andrew Rubin: I think there are probably three things that I didn’t necessarily know I was looking for. Certainly in hindsight, there are three things that made it easy for me to believe that we could do it. The first one was, in every sense of the word, trust. Like a hastily-arranged marriage, sometimes you have to figure things out much faster than you expect. For whatever reason, I completely and utterly trusted that PJ would do the right thing every time.

Sramana Mitra: How do you gauge that when you just met the person?

Andrew Rubin: It’s a great question. A lot of it is your gut and intuition based on how they present themselves and how they want to work on something with you. For instance, one of the things that I think a partnership requires is the mindset of the person being all in. You’re about to take a bet that unfortunately requires absolute commitment at every possible level. Very early on in my conversations with PJ, it became very obvious that we were both equally excited and also equally willing to take the risk and make the commitment to try and do this. You can see that and you can sense it.

The first thing is trust, but maybe not the kind of trust that you have with someone after you’ve been with them for 20 years. This is the kind of trust that very early on becomes obvious because of their excitement, passion, and level of commitment. There’s a version of trust that comes early on and that was a big piece.

Sramana Mitra: If I am to synthesize what I heard, it was not so much trust that you were able to figure out. What you figured out was a level of commitment that made you feel comfortable taking the step. The trust was born out of watching his commitment.

Andrew Rubin: I think that’s fair to say. The only comment that I would make is that in this type of marriage, trust and commitment go hand in hand. In the very early days, the very first form of trust is knowing that the person is committed to it as you are. Quite frankly, there will be good days and bad days. There’s absolutely no guarantee of success. In the very beginning, trust and commitment go hand in hand.

Sramana Mitra: I think it’s an interesting point. The commitment is necessary but not necessarily sufficient. A lot of people get into committed situations but don’t really follow through or don’t have the ability to follow through. Anyway, let’s not belabor the point. What were the second and third points that you were going to make?

Andrew Rubin: The second one was I wanted somebody who balanced out the things that I didn’t know. What I knew I could bring to the table was the customer’s perspective. I spent my entire career talking to customers and working with customers. What I knew I couldn’t bring to the table was the incredibly deep engineering and architectural focus that it would take to bring a product to life. In a lot of ways, PJ and I were lucky because it was a perfect marriage in that respect. That didn’t take time to figure out. It was very obvious what his skill set and background was. When we married the two up, it really blended two very different perspectives together. It was easy but very important for me.

The third and final one was I actually believed early on that there had to be a willingness to actually think very far outside of the box. Let me quantify this a little bit. Unlike trust, there are easy ways to talk about how you want to go about starting a company and in particular, how you think about the product that the company is going to start with and will be based on. This is different from how you’re going to build it over the long term. Both of us came out of the same traditional security space. Quite frankly, despite of a lot of successful startups in that space, the path has mostly been iterative and very incremental. We both agreed that the problem required thinking from a completely blank page about something that was fundamentally different from the beginning. One of the things that was important was not just agreeing that the problem required that, but that we can actually build something that was fundamentally different.

That’s something that oftentimes is hard to envision doing until you’re actually in the motion. For me, I had made up my mind that I would rather join a company than start a company unless it was going to do something that had a shot at changing the game. One of the things that PJ and I discovered early on in talking about how we wanted to approach the product side and how we would pitch it to investors is that neither of us were interested in incremental.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio
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