Name: Rubrik CEO on Balancing AI Growth and Cybersecurity
Uploaded: 2026-03-24T04:14:00Z
Duration: 22 min 38 s
Description: As companies rush to integrate agentic AI, speed without security is becoming a significant liability. Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha discusses the recent software selloff, enterprise AI strategy, and defense against rising cyber threats amid geopolitical volatility.

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As companies rush to integrate agentic AI, speed without security is becoming a significant liability. Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha discusses the recent software selloff, enterprise AI strategy, and defense against rising cyber threats amid geopolitical volatility. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260324/35aaeb00-5fa3-43d1-89cc-f4d9341c04af/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

As companies rush to integrate agentic AI, speed without security is becoming a significant liability. Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha discusses the recent software selloff, enterprise AI strategy, and defense against rising cyber threats amid geopolitical volatility.

Rubrik CEO on Balancing AI Growth and Cybersecurity 

Part of the reason I was eager to have this conversation with you tonight is because you wear or have worn two hats. You were a venture capitalist, and then you were a founder and CEO. And those are very different jobs. I mean, venture capitalists invest in lots of companies, assuming most of them will fail and one or two will succeed. Whereas, when you become a founder, that horse is yours, baby. You gotta make that one succeed. And I wonder how you made that transition or deal with those two hats.

My fundamental belief is that human mind has two states, a state of will and a state of intellect. The state of intellect is pessimistic. It always looks at what is the downside, what could go wrong. And VCs, which I was, live in this state of intellect. They always are looking for what could go wrong. So they meet 100 entrepreneurs-

Alan: Inherently pessimists.

Exactly. They meet 100 entrepreneurs and they invest in two on a good year, maybe one. And, as a founder, you are in this state of will, because you have portfolio of one, and you are only looking at the upside. And I love that state of will more than the state of intellect. So the moment I realized where my passion was, I left venture capital to start a company.

So you prefer the state of will.

Bipul: 100%.

Where do you think CFOs lie? Just askin'.

The way I think about CFO is, obviously our CFO, Kiran, is in the room. CFOs manage the risk of the business. And as a founder/CEO, you are at the farthest corner trying to accelerate the business. And as with everything, truth is somewhere in the middle where you take a little bit of intellectual view of the business, you take a real view of the business as a founder, and then you come to the middle to really build a long-term business.

Alan: Does he ever say no to you?

100% of time.

And when he says no, do you take that for an answer?

Then I convince him. That's where closer comes in, that AI cannot do.

All right. And tell us why, there's a lot I wanna talk to you about, but tell us how you got to Rubrik. Rubrik does backup and recovery. And I read somewhere that you chose this business because none of the cool kids wanted to do it and you thought that meant that would be an opportunity.

So if you look at my background, I'm three things. I started as an engineer in Silicon Valley. I have more than 30 patents in distributed computing. I studied electrical engineering. Then I went to Wharton and studied finance and became venture capitalist. And I was very fortunate to be part of a few situations that went on to become very large companies, including Nutanix, Snapchat, and others. And then I started Rubrik. And my idea about business has always been that do not go where cool kids are going. Because if you go back to 2013, when I was thinking about Rubrik, everyone was focused on mobile, social, local, Uber, and I said, "What is the most boring part of the IT, enterprise IT?" And I saw this market backup and recovery that is 20, $30 billion market dominated by old companies that are seeking rent and not doing any innovation, and I thought, "What could be a better place than go start a company to really take candies from kids?" And I literally called three of my friends, four of us sat on Sandhill in a room with whiteboard 12 years ago, and today we are a public company, 4,000 employees close-

And 10 billion in market capitalization. It's worked out okay for you.

Always go to place where cool kids are not going.

Don't follow the cool kids. I also saw you quoted, saying that you think the day is not far away when we will have a $1 trillion dollar cyber-

Absolutely-

Alan: Is Rubrik gonna be that company?

We'll see.

Alan: Yeah, you got about 100x to go there, but you-

I know. We went from 0 to 10-

So why not?

See, at the end of the day, if you look at our human mind, we have evolved on a daily, monthly, yearly basis. So we have a very linear mind, because that's how we have evolved. But if you look at phenomena, whether it is technology, business, fame, they go super linear. And our belief and our evolution stops us from thinking what could happen. And in venture capital, I used to always say, "Suspend your belief, because your belief is wrong, because your belief is linear." Companies are super linear. Similarly, when we look at our largest cybersecurity company today, they are 100, 150 billion. But the speed of AI has completely changed cyber. I mean, cybersecurity, as we know it today, is dead because it was built for human beings. Now in the world of agents, you can't bring humans to take care of problems of agents. So it's a completely new industry with tremendous opportunities.

I wanna dive deep into that and the cyber risks that companies are facing today because every CFO in this room cares about that. But I do wanna ask you, you're a $10 billion company, but you did get hit by the SaaSpocalypse, right? I mean, do you think that's just silly?

Look, at the end of the day, I accept what the market is because-

You do?

Accepting reality is the first point of progress. So you accept what it is and then go build from there. Look, at the end of the day, market is smart to figure out if it is a good company or a bad company. You cannot hide good company, or also you cannot hide bad company.

But this market movement seemed to be saying, "Oh, Anthropic or OpenAI was gonna take over your business."

That's nothing new. I mean, if you go back to the days of internet, I came to Silicon Valley almost 30 years ago and I've seen few cycles, you always overemphasize a trend and then put everybody in the penalty box till they prove that they are with the trend. And that's what is going on. In my mind, AI is a great sorting machine. It will figure out what is a real company that is AI positive, which means that they are AI accelerated, and things that are not. And things that are not should not exist. That's our creative destruction, capitalism. That's what we live for.

So we're at this moment, we're in a war with Iran. I'm changing the subject on you here a little bit. We're not gonna talk about the market. We're in a war with Iran and the administration seems to have, some degree, been surprised by the willingness of Iran to pull out all its stops to use every weapon it can use. One weapon it can use is a pretty sophisticated network of hackers who are pretty good at wreaking havoc, cyber havoc. I mentioned at the beginning, I talked to one CEO, one of our CEO council members, who said he's seen a 3x increase in attacks from Iran. What are you seeing?

I mean, I would say you ain't seen nothing yet. Because in the world of AI-accelerated technology, who will adopt AI faster? Not you and I, because we have compliance, regulation, governance, making sure the data is regulated and private. Bad guys have no such constraints. They are going to take AI to the max. And this is where, as the kinetic action, geopolitical risk increases, we need to really up the ante in terms of what we are doing to protect ourselves.

And you're seeing this happen now, but you expect it to get much more-

100%. It's happening now. You are seeing reports of nation-state actors. Because, look, cyber warfare can be completely asymmetric because there is no conventional weapon required. And with open source, cloud, general knowledge, AI, the knowledge is flattened. A kid sitting in China has the same knowledge about the world and software and AI as somebody growing up in Palo Alto.

Well, it looks like it may also be asymmetric in terms of targets. I mean, the biggest published example we've seen in recent days was Stryker, which makes medical equipment. It's not involved in the war in any way. It's not a defense company. I mean, do you think every company has to be on the lookout for this?

They're not impacting just the defense companies, they are impacting things that can have the biggest brand impact. Because Stryker, people know the name, people recognize the name. So if you have any business with any brand name, you are a target.

And what else defines the Iranian-inspired cyberattacks?

I mean, it is no different than what we saw in Ukraine-Russia situation. As soon as you have kinetic action in a geopolitical situation, you have the state-sponsored actor, nation-state actors start retaliatory things because they wanna establish supremacy in terms of like, "Hey, if you hit me physically, I can hit you digitally." And what is the new trend in this particular situation is attackers, both physical and digital, are going for economic infrastructure, which is your data center, AI, digital infrastructure. This is a whole new world.

And their purpose is just to create havoc.

Purpose is to disrupt.

I mean, this gets to the question that was our table discussion, this balance between the push for the speed of adopting AI and the need to govern risks. As companies move faster to adopt AI agents, to deploy AI in different ways, how much are they increasing the space of attack for the bad guys?

I mean, look, we have a lot of CFOs in the room, and they completely understand this because they live in this world of speed and safety. They wanna take advantage of the market opportunity, opportunities, but at the same time they wanna preserve the business that you have. And AI is going to be the same. It's about can we move fast and take advantage of the productivity that you can achieve with AI? At the same time, you don't want to unleash risk. So in my mind, the people who will have tremendous success are folks who are thinking about, first of all, what are the core workflows that this would completely do AI transformation of that has both top line and bottom line impact, and identifies in every line of business five to seven such workflows and do not think about assisting humans? Think about replacing humans for those workloads. And the job of AI-

Now, why is that? I usually hear people say the opposite. To empower the humans, you're saying replace the humans.

Yes, you have to replace the human for mundane work and then elevate humans to be the orchestrator of AI. Think about every employee in your company now have 10 new hires working for them. They're out of top colleges in America. What would you do? You go do their work? You do not want to micromanage AI. You wanna get work done from AI when they make a mistake. You wanna teach them how to work done right instead of doing the work. So that is the new world that we are going to live. We are going to have tremendous productivity. In fact, when iPhone first came, I actually read an analogy that iPhone was equivalent to 17 servants that somebody could have for the equivalent productivity in medieval times. So now think about with AI you are unleashing so many assistants and people who are working for you.

How is AI changing your, by the way, I wanna open this up to questions because all of you were dealing with cyber risks in particular. Would love to get your thoughts on it. But before I do that, how are you deploying AI within Rubrik?

We are deploying AI everywhere. In fact, we are mandating that every employee should use Claude Cowork. And if you are an engineer, must use Claude Code. Because this idea that, the interesting part of AI is that AI is actually helping people do custom work because there are no generic employees in a company. So AI has to be custom to your business. And when AI is custom, everybody will discover their own workflows and use cases that they can automate with AI. So you need to have AI with everyone. And we are seeing tremendous benefits. I mean, Rubrik is 12 years old. I've done numerous product reviews. For the first time, very recently, an engineering team came up to me and they said, "We are advancing or moving up our deadline for important product delivery by a quarter." It has never happened. I mean, they are always late and delayed. And when they say, "I'm going to get done with this in, like, six months," and you multiply by two, and then say, "Okay, 12 months best case." It's changing..

Alan: Mm. Questions, comments.

Craig: Hi, Craig Greiwe, GoDigital. So everyone I hear talk about AI will talk about how we're in the infancy, or the crawling stage, or babies who walk around and crawl and they put things in their mouth and bang their heads. How do you reconcile the infancy of AI with the recommendation that you don't micromanagement in the concept of security and resilience?

The way to think about AI is AI is not in its infancy, AI is very, very smart. What is early is does AI know your business? And this is where you need to teach AI how you do business and how AI can be effective in your business. You have to teach them business processes, what does it mean to have a customer, how do you run business process, what is the order to cast process in your business? And that's where you need to teach AI as how to run business, but let them run business and then you give them instruction if they make a mistake.

But then how, this pressure to go fast, I mean, what you're talking about takes time. It takes time to understand the business, to understand the business processes. It doesn't happen like that. It's not just bringing in an agent and saying, "Go wild."

Absolutely. So what you have to do is you have to tell your people to use AI because when your people are starting to use AI, they will teach AI the business processes that they are working on. And that's how the AI will learn the business process. So you have to distribute the teaching by having everyone in your company use AI.

So does that mean that the folks in this room should get off this kick of saying, "Where is the ROI on AI," because if you take that approach, so this is a teaching moment, it's gonna be a while before you see return.

It's not going to be a very long time, but you cannot expect ROI in a completely new initiative in your first six months. You have to go first invest, experiment, fail, iterate, and then you will have productivity. It's like anything else in life.

Other questions, comments, provocations. It's a very active table back there. I think the conversation about sex seems to have raised the interest level.

Audience Member: For the folks building digital products here who might be competing with... Digital products here, which might be competing with the large language models. How do you recommend them to protect against the disruption that may happen with the large language models?

So if you think about large language model, it is a factory of intelligence. But it may not know very deeply how a particular function works in a particular industry, in a particular department. So you have to go depth first if you wanna compete with LLM. I mean, look, I mean, your company, you are helping businesses close the quarter by using AI as opposed to accountants. That's a great example. You have a very specific thing that you're trying to solve in a very specific way that LLMs have much bigger fish to fry. So they are more of like general purpose intelligence, you are actually harnessing that power, focusing on one problem and going depth first.

I think Ben has a question-

Ben: I do.

Who doesn't have a microphone.

Ben: Thank you. I do not have a microphone, I do now. Thank you so much for this, Bipul. I'm curious, you know, part of the promise of AI is that it can consume massive amounts of data about our companies and then give us information that, you know, in a significantly more efficient way than was previously possible. That was actually the focus of Alan's newsletter this morning, was a process we're piloting within the Leadership Institute. But I'm curious how you square that with the reality that for everyone in this room they have a finite amount of time and they have basically, you know, more tasks they can do in a day than they have time to do those jobs. And so I'm curious, like, the value of AI at a kind of a mid or lower level to automate tasks, give you insight makes a lot of sense to me. But actually at, like, the very top of the tree, you are dealing with people who, generally speaking, are kind of have been getting that information anyway from their teams and what doesn't change is there are 24 hours in a day, and there are 60 minutes in an hour. So I'm curious if you have any examples where, you know, you have used AI to get, you know, insight significantly faster than you could before where you've owned the whole process kinda from end to end as opposed to someone kind of giving you information.

If you look at the traditional role of a CEO, since the information was locked in in the IT department and other department, you needed somebody to disintermediate and come in and help you get that information for you. With AI, you now have the power of the whole organization's information and documents and data at your fingertips. So your ability to have a conversation with AI and discover truth in a conversational way is unique. Unless you have somebody sitting with you 24/7 on every topic that you might be interested on and giving you that information, there is no equivalent. So in some ways, what I'm saying is in my own function, our head of our office of the CEO is a lot more effective today with fewer people than we were two years ago.

Fascinating, fascinating. Bipul, you were trained as a technologist, you understand technology, but where did you learn leadership? Did you learn it from a book, from a coach, from a particular mentor?

School of hard knocks.

Yeah.

When I started Rubrik, first time I was running a startup, heck, I never worked at a startup, I was a venture capitalist. And before then, I had maximum managed 15 people ever. And so when I started the company, I made every mistake that one can make, particularly going from a startup founder to a skilled CEO are two completely different skills. So I had to really relearn and forget, force forget everything that I knew as a startup founder to become a skilled CEO.

But you did it all on your own. Any great books you read on leadership that helped you think this through?

I read lots of books. The problem with books is that it's all post-facto, very clean analysis. Connecting the dot is very, very hard. One thing that I learned along the way, which is really the biggest thing I learned, was when I was early in my career as a CEO, I used to look for myself and everyone. And I've very soon realized that that's a very wrong approach because you have high expectation, then they get disappointed, all sorts of things happen. Meet people where they are. Whatever is their strength and weakness, my job is to accentuate their strengths and try to minimize their weakness. So meeting people where they are was the biggest learning that I had in the last 12 years.

Great point to end on, Bipul. Thank you very much for taking some time with us this evening. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Great to see you. Thank you so much.

The WSJ Leadership Institute Presents: Leaders. A new podcast series bringing you revealing conversations with top executives shaping business today. Hosted by Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, the series goes beyond headlines to explore how leadership really works in times of upheaval, transformation, and uncertainty. Our first episode was released Monday, Sept. 22, at 5:00 a.m. ET, with new episodes every other Monday.