Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your selection of which investors to work with, what was your decision making? Was it people you worked with before?

Arvind Jain: There are two key investors in our first round. One of them was Ravi from Lightspeed. I had worked with him in my previous startup. It was an easy choice from that perspective. We also raised from Kleiner Perkins. They had the right experience for us.

Sramana Mitra: This was 2019?

Arvind Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get a product out?

Arvind Jain: The first version that we could give to somebody to play with and give us some early feedback took us nine months.

Sramana Mitra: About the beginning or second quarter of 2020 was when you launched?

Arvind Jain: It wasn’t a launch. It’s still early.

Sramana Mitra: What about customers? Were these people you had relationships with before?

Arvind Jain: Some yes and some no. The right approach is to get some support from people you know but mostly focused on call outreach to companies that we think are going to be our customers.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find that interest? Who were the early adopters?

Arvind Jain: We started with technology companies. That’s what I’m familiar with. We saw this problem at tech companies and at our own company before. We wanted to focus on that vertical. We wanted to connect with midsized companies that are fast moving. We focused on a few of these midmarket companies.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you sell to? Is it the CIO?

Arvind Jain: Typically the CIO. The company aims to make the organization more productive. Since it has a broad impact, we work with the CIOs.

Sramana Mitra: What were the terms of this beta? Is it used for six months and then you go into a paid engagement?

Arvind Jain: When we started, we had no line of sight of when we would charge them. We didn’t charge them for almost a year.

Sramana Mitra: Why is that?

Arvind Jain: We were focused on trying to get as many users as possible and see what needs to be done. We didn’t want to create friction when we start to charge. We established a goal that we would have 20 companies using our product wall to wall. That’s the minimum set of customers that we needed.

We didn’t charge all of these early customers for a while. Once we knew that we had success in these companies and that we have a product that can scale, that’s when we charged. That’s when we came out of beta.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain
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