When Arvind Jain, now co-founder of Rubrik and Glean, took a job at Google, he felt like an “impostor.” An engineer moved to America from a small town in India and suddenly found himself surrounded by PhDs from MIT and Stanford. Therefore, he made it a rule to calmly study those around him.
And one of these people was a product manager who had just joined the company. His name was Sundar Pichai.
“We were together at Google for a long time. I knew him since he joined us as an individual contributor,” Jain exclusively revealed. Luck.
“We had some brilliant people at Google, they came from top schools, they were high achievers, and there were some who grew and shined, and there were others who didn’t,” he said. “I thought I was lucky that somehow I ended up in this group of amazing people… And that’s why I tried to learn and observe, what makes a person successful?”
Of course, Pichai was one of the ones to shine. He became Google’s CEO in August 2015, just over a decade after joining the company.
“What I learned from watching him was that he continued to display the same qualities – intensity, hard work. But also the ability to think big and be confident,” Jain said. “You have to think crazy.”
Sundar Pichai’s Google Chrome success proves ‘crazy’ is better than hard work, says CEO
The moment this crystallized was watching Pichai champion Google Chrome, at a time when on paper the idea looked stupid.
Browsers were Microsoft’s territory, Netscape had already failed, and few at Google thought the effort was worth it. Jaina included.
“I thought it was a bad idea,” he admitted. “I didn’t think big enough.”
Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once publicly called Chrome a “rounding error.”
But of course, Chrome went on to become the most widely used browser in the world – far more than Microsoft Internet Explorer. By 2012, it had already surpassed its competitors to become the most used browser in the world, helping to cement Pichai’s reputation within Google and paving the way for his eventual ascension to CEO.
“You have to say: We are going to do something that everyone thinks is stupid and perhaps unrealistic,” Jain realized from this experience. “That’s when the magic happens.”
And he says it reinforces the idea that “crazy” thinking is as important a quality as diligence – something Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin share with Pichai.
“They didn’t have any restrictions on what was possible,” Jain added.
“So I think those were the two main things I learned: working hard, but then ignoring normality and having limiting thinking on a regular basis.”
Arvind Jain created two startups worth billions of dollars after leaving Google.
Jain left Google having quietly absorbed everything he observed and applied it twice.
He co-founded Rubrik, a cloud data management company that IPOed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 at about $5.6 billion, and then launched Glean, an artificial intelligence startup that helps employees search for and understand information across the company.
Glean is now valued at $7.2 billion.
And Jain is still taking lessons from his colleagues. This time around, the CEO says he’s getting the most entries from his younger Gen Z employees.
“I actually feel like I learn the most from the youngest people,” he said. Luck. “These are the ones who haven’t seen what I’ve seen. They have new perspectives.”