Overcoming odds: Entrepreneur Bipul Sinha’s tale of perseverance and innovation

(May 1, 2024) “If I fail, how will I go back.” This thought kept venture capitalist-turned-entrepreneur Bipul Sinha up for many nights after he co-founded Rubrik, a cloud data management and data security company, in January 2014. There hadn’t been a single hiring in the company for the last 45 days. “If there is nobody to write the code,” the IIT Kharagpur alum would ask himself, “How will the startup kick-off?”

In just over six weeks, the entrepreneur may have conducted interviews with numerous potential candidates, yet none managed to meet the final requirements of the company. “There was nothing to work, nothing to begin, and nothing to show,” the entrepreneur shared in an interview, whose company is currently valued at $6.67 billion. About a decade since its inception, the cybersecurity unicorn backed by Microsoft is poised for its initial public offering.

“One of the biggest challenges earlier on,” shared the entrepreneur, “was striking the balance between knowing when to get involved and when to step away from decision-making. As a founder CEO a company is your “baby” and it can be easy to become a bottleneck as a result. Early on, I tried to mitigate this risk by stepping away too fast – and found that more hands-on input was still needed. The company is now past that stage and is doing very well.”

As per its IPO documents, by January 2024, Rubrik boasts over 1,700 customers with an annual contract value of $100,000. Nearly 100 customers were paying Rubrik over $1 million annually. While the tech unicorn witnessed a moderate revenue increase from $599.8 million to $627.9 million within a year, the most notable growth came from subscription revenue, soaring by 40 percent from $385.3 million to $537.9 million. This significant rise indicates a promising shift towards a recurring revenue model for the company.

Humble beginnings

Born and brought up in Darbhanga, a city in northern Bihar, Bipul Sinha experienced a childhood marked by poverty and financial struggles. His father, an entrepreneur, faced numerous challenges, and the initial venture in the pharmaceutical sector couldn’t be sustained. With financial difficulties mounting, the family moved to another small town in Bihar, yet misfortune continued to shadow their path. “My father was a failed entrepreneur,” he shared, adding, “We grew up in a lot of poverty. We were always moving because we couldn’t pay the rent and one had to even live in a basement with no running water for a while. Our shack was in an area which always used to get inundated during the monsoons If one is born and brought up in poverty the only thing that one becomes good at is maximising opportunities.”

But, not the one to be deterred by the situation, the entrepreneur spent numerous hours studying under the small lamp that his family-owned. For me, it was one day and one opportunity at a time. All I could think about was how to maximise whatever I had. Education was my only road to salvation,” the Global Indian adds.

As his family couldn’t enroll him in a private school, the entrepreneur received much of his formal education in Hindi. Unfortunately, the educational disparity grew too wide to overcome. “The idea of engineering was seeded by my father, who looked upon it as a silver bullet to end the family woes. But there was no money to afford coaching,” shared the entrepreneur, who then came up with an ingenious idea. He purchased 30 postcards, each costing 15 paise, and dispatched them to coaching institutes nationwide. “I wanted to have a look at the prospectus, and syllabus and then prepare a rough framework of how to prepare for the exam,” shared the entrepreneur.

Testing times

However, the plan didn’t work, and Bipul Sinha failed to get to any college in his first attempt. While he was dejected, the entrepreneur’s father had a lot of confidence in him. “I couldn’t clear any exams, even the engineering exams conducted by the Bihar state government,” shared Sinha laughing, adding, “But my father asked me to prepare for one more year. And look at the silver lining. Had you cleared the state exams, you would have lost an opportunity to make it to IIT.”

Despite his initial aversion to math, engineering became a necessity for Sinha. In his second year of preparation, he adjusted his exam strategy. Collaborating with another engineering hopeful, they pooled resources — the entrepreneur’s mother even borrowed money from relatives — to purchase coaching materials, eventually securing admission to IIT. “In my last year, I landed a job at Tata Information System (a Tata-IBM joint venture) via campus placement. And that wasn’t less than a miracle for my family,” shared the entrepreneur.

From Bihar to Silicon Valley

While he had joined a good company, he had realised that he had to go abroad to pull his family out of the financial crisis. “I was racing against time. I wanted to upgrade the life of my family as soon as possible. And America was the only hope,” he said.

The entrepreneur spent eight years working for Oracle, polishing his skills and securing several patents in distributed systems after training as an engineer before the entrepreneur “got the confidence that I won’t slip back into poverty,” he said. After securing enough funds, Bipul Sinha founded Rubrik. “As a venture capitalist, I always believed in going after a market that the cool kids were not paying attention to, which essentially means that you want to bet on a non-consensus market. If everybody knows that this market is going to be lucrative, there will be a lot of companies getting started, which means that the value creation will get diluted. The cool kids were not thinking about backup and recovery. And there was an opportunity to reframe, re-platform backup and recovery into a data security platform to deliver cyber resilience,” the entrepreneur said.

Talking about his company further, Bipul Sinha added, “The traditional cybersecurity industry almost earns $200 billion per year selling 60 to 80 different tools across hundreds of vendors for prevention. And they have not been able to prevent anything. Ransomware was a reckoning for our industry,” shared the entrepreneur, adding, “Rubrik counts Whirlpool, PepsiCo, and Goldman Sachs among its long list of clients.” Proudly, the company announced its recognition as a Leader, positioned furthest in vision in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.

• Follow Bipul Sinha on LinkedIn