Arvind Jain is CEO and co-founder of Glean, the search engine for the workplace. Previously, he co-founded and led R&D at Rubrik, one of the fastest growing companies in cloud data management.
Jain also spent over a decade at Google (GOOG) as a distinguished engineer, where he led teams in Google’s Search, Maps, and YouTube products. Earlier in his career, he held leadership positions at Akamai (AKAM) and Microsoft (MSFT).
Glean has raised around $150m (£123.7m) in funding after three rounds, with a company valuation of £1bn.
Early on in my career, in the late 90s, I encountered Cosmos Nicolaou, who was a director of technology at Akamai. I was 25 and starting out in my career and Cos had a big impact on me
He has a chilled and personable attitude and isn’t intimidating at all. He made you feel at ease from the off and I never felt as if he was my boss. He made me believe a lot more in myself and I have been able to carry that on throughout my career. He instilled confidence where before I never felt like I could be an engineer.
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His key attribute was that he believes in you and lets you have big responsibility and opportunity. He pushed and placed trust in me in that way. I was given the opportunity to lead a big product despite being one of the younger cohort. Frankly, it wasn’t my expectation.
Building a product will always encounter problems. I foresaw some of those tough challenges and I think he gave me more interaction. I started as a software engineer before Cos made me architect for the entire product.
I joined Cos at Google in late 2003 where I was for 11 years before Glean was founded.
As an employee, Glean makes it easy for people to find the information they need to be more productive and happier at work. Say, if you are looking for a particular piece of knowledge or a document, or have questions in the workplace such as how to sign up for benefits. Glean’s job is to make that process of finding answers much easier and faster.
We connect with all of a company’s knowledge and different applications, be it Slack, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Outlook and gives one unified search experience. Just like Google does for search, we do the same in the work space.
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The reason why we started Glean spawned from my previous start-up at Rubrik. We grew to 1,000 staff very quickly and a lot of people in the company were new. Our productivity was suffering as we grew and we weren’t getting the same value from all the investments we made.
As a way of finding out what was going wrong, we conducted a survey and people told us that the reason why work wasn’t getting done was because they couldn’t find information or who to ask for help.
I tried to solve the problem. As a modern tech company, there was nothing unique in what we were doing. The reason why people couldn’t progress was down to using 300 applications and our company knowledge was fragmented and scattered across them all.
It was a basic fundamental problem. We use an AI platform to help with an employee’s search term. We disconnect with all the applications and, by using Glean, it can be up and running within an hour. It’s that simple.
I still feel that this is a problem that companies have chosen not to focus on. How do you help employees become more productive and find answers? Well, I feel it has been a problem that has been ignored for a long time. It has come at a cost. After all, we spend a quarter to a third of our time searching for information without success.
According to a poll commissioned by Glean this month, it takes the average American worker a year and seven months to feel like they’re ‘thriving’ in a new job, while the average respondent uses 11 different applications and platforms in their day-to-day work and spend on average 13 minutes searching on their own before asking for help.
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With Glean, employees are saving three to four hours every week. We aren’t reducing this to zero, but we are making a big dent into it.
The shift to a distributed work environment has really made it important for companies to provide good tools to people so they can self-serve themselves.
Luckily, Cos and I have since had the opportunity to work together. He has advised me on hitting scale and growing the team. He loves the product and how it’s a very important problem to solve. He thinks it will have a big impact on all of our work lives.
Arvind Jain was speaking at Web Summit 2022 in Lisbon.
