One Rocketship Ticket to the Deathstar
Pros
There is an insurmountable pile of talent and fantastic people at Rubrik and the company has survived the fasted growth curve in silicon valley history. With arguably one of the highest turnover rates. Kudos to recruiting for keeping up.
Cons
We grew irresponsibly fast, without qualified management and the trend continues. Herculean leaps have lead to Medusan gaps that the tier one team we have cannot cross. The tentacles are flying. Many of our sales representatives are/were second to none in the world and make more money than most silicon valley executives, yet many have gone. Rubrik is a fantastic product and many of our customers love us, if they purchased product versions that are functional. Unfortunately, the trend in backup tech has been to force out new product releases to one-up the competition and that has significantly hurt this company and its reputation. Further, the valuation of our addressable market has been vastly outdone. Rubrik calls the market at $48B; however most competitors, investment banks, and management consulting firms analyze the backup market between $12B-$17B. This discrepancy has lead to massive issues that could unravel the Rubrik facade. We are hands down the best technology in the world for backing up hybrid workloads to AWS and Azure, which is why we are the largest driver of their storage consumption. Unfortunately, that is not good enough for our executive and product teams, so they continue to spit out functions that do not work. To be clear, we are not a cloud product. We are a hardware product that is software defined. If there is no on-prem component, we are not the best solution. Rubik is the leader in backing up hybrid environments that span modern on-prem infrastructure and AWS and Azure clouds, nothing more and nothing less. Aggressive progression in technology has lead to a fault and it brings pain to the sales reps who put an unbelievable amount of time into the company's success, with little or no reward. We are not Multi-Cloud Data Control, we can hardly control data in one public cloud. Buy from the solid sales reps and don't drink the management's cool-aid. They're firing many of the good reps and replacing them with EMC and Commvault's D teams because we already ran through A-C teams. The comp structure and territories are a collective disaster which until last week, new management did not recognize until last week; their stock options must be blinding. Do not expect to come to Rubrik and make your variable, roughly 1 in 3 reps get close. In my opinion the fundamental fault of this company is the focus on ego and brand that over looks the client facing team, and more unfortunately customers. Many fantastic sales reps have come and gone, not from due to their talent or ability but from the ignorance of upper management and their faulty territory planning. A few great people are still around; however, I suggest speaking to a handful here before you join and to take other firms into serious consideration when you're interviewing. The base may look shiny, but that variable is unlikely to ever materialize. Don't drink the cool-aid.
