Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements when you were not charging yet?

Arvind Jain: We realized that using the product was so obvious. Everybody needs to find information. If I’m going to make it easy for people, then they should be using it. We realized that the companies have different personas. Some of them didn’t need the product.

Sramana Mitra: There are use cases that have more mission criticality and more intensity in usage.

Arvind Jain: That’s right. And these users are more comfortable using new tools without some kind of enablement and training. Customer support and engineering were the ones who were adopting the product.

Sramana Mitra: Early adopters.

Arvind Jain: As opposed to other users. That’s one thing. No matter how useful your product is and how good it is, you still need enablement in the enterprise. You need a champion. Who’s going to bring that product in the company? Everybody is busy.

Sramana Mitra: Adoption is a very difficult thing to achieve.

Arvind Jain: We had some good ideas. We realized that habits are hard to break. People have a certain way of finding things. When they have a question, they just go to Slack and ask that question. That’s what they want to keep doing as opposed to doing the search.

Sramana Mitra: Did you include Slack questions into your product?

Arvind Jain: Yes. People would discover Glean that way.

Sramana Mitra: When you started selling the product, did you use that knowledge that it’s in the technical organization that you’re getting higher traction? Did you use that in the sales process?

Arvind Jain: Yes. Wherever you achieve success, you double down on that. In this case, when we saw that we were seeing a lot of traction with engineering teams, we started to go and spend more time with CTOs and VPs of Engineering. We added them to our target persona.

Sramana Mitra: The sales cycle changed somewhat as you discovered that. You were going through the technical organization than the CIO.

Arvind Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2020? What kind of traction did you get? What is the average deal size? What are you learning from the market at this point?

Arvind Jain: We started to commercialize in the middle of 2020. The data was still pretty sparse. The first year, we did about $3 million in revenue. Maybe our average account size was around $70,000.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a lot of accounts to do $70,000 deals and get to $3 million in revenue. That’s a sizable number of customers you managed to close.

Arvind Jain: Yes, about 45 customers.

Sramana Mitra: Then the pandemic hits.

Arvind Jain: We’re already in the pandemic.

Sramana Mitra: Did you feel differently in the pandemic? Was there something going on?

Arvind Jain: The pandemic made everybody appreciative of working remotely and from home. It was even more important for people to have good tools. Imagine you are working on a task. You have a question. Guess what? There’s no person next to you to ask. How do you make sure that people don’t get slowed down significantly?

Search became even more important to solve in that distributed environment. We saw that all industry leaders were all thinking about that. How can I help my employees be productive. We didn’t have a negative impact.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain
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