A View from the Top: Bipul Sinha, CEO of Rubrik, on getting back to basics

Tech founder Bipul Sinha on why simplification is the key to success

Sinha has a fondness for pink shirts (Rubrik)

The problem, said Bipul Sinha, CEO of Rubrik, is “cognitive dissonance”. The answer is “radical transparency”, as provided by Rubrik.

We were halfway to Paris, having lunch at Searcy’s in St Pancras with the Eurostar getting up steam right outside. But also, very approximately, halfway between a small town outside Calcutta where he was born, and Silicon Valley where he lives now, 43 years later, poised between East and West.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who is in the avant-garde of new technology, he also stoutly maintains (like Ecclesiastes) that “there is nothing new under the sun”. He is a great reader of history, a student of the achievements of Genghis Khan and Napoleon. Not that he is a fan of wars and going about slaughtering people, as such, but he admires how unconstrained they were by their obscure, relatively humble origins. “Genghis Khan was an illiterate. Born in the Steppes. Who would have thought he could have founded an empire vast enough to rival the Romans?” Bipul Sinha is similarly nomadic.

He also has a fondness for pink shirts, which he buys at Thomas Pink in London. His first language was Hindi and he only started picking up English around the age of 14. He studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, joined IBM in Bangalore, and then took off to the United States, getting a job with American Megatrend in Atlanta. “My motivation was purely economic,” he says. “I wanted to earn dollars. So I went to America.” He still goes back to India, but he considers himself more at home in the United States. He is now more a fan of Abraham Lincoln than Genghis Khan. “Self-educated and yet rose to become the most influential man of the nineteenth century.”

Sinha went to Oracle, took an MBA at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, shrewdly invested in Snapchat, and co-founded Rubrik in 2014 in collaboration with Facebook and Google engineers. It’s cloud-based data management. “The lifeblood of every business is data. And anyone who cares about data should care about Rubrik,” he says. It does what you would expect, provides back-up systems and security against hackers, but it also insures you against the increasing anxiety of TMI, having more information than you can manage, a sense of data chaos.

For Sinha, less is more. “If you want to capture the totality, to connect up the dots, you have to simplify. You don’t talk about everything, you zero in on the significant details. The fundamentals. Almost like a caricature.”

This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. Or rather, is taken out. Sinha speaks less like a geek, more like a highly animated psychologist or a philosopher. “Everybody is conflicted. We have a sense of opposing forces at work. We want to overcome cognitive dissonance.” He admits that there is something of the theory of meditation in his business approach, the basic idea of transcending complexity and simplifying thought to achieve clarity. He sees large corporations on the model of the human mind. “If our minds were so easy to begin with, then meditation would not exist.”

He references A Suitable Boy, the brilliant and sprawling novel by the great Indian writer Vikram Seth. “Lata [the protagonist] has to make a choice between three different suitors. She is faced by too much data. In the end she has to decide.” What do great movies, books and salespeople have in common? “They create a sense of unbearable tension with alternative possibilities, but then you have to resolve the tension.” He also thought he recognised something similar in the way an ad for cigarettes worked in one of the Mad Men TV shows, about advertising in the US in the Sixties. “It told you, it’s OK to be doing this. You’re not afraid of it any more.”

Sinha has the long view of history, inflected with a sense of evolution, not just in the technological realm. “Think about your fight or flight response. It all depends on your understanding of the situation. If you see a lion or a snake coming towards you, you’re not confused. Your cognitive dissonance is dramatically reduced.”

He is all about the need for simplification. “Look at this computer”, he says, pulling an Air out of his briefcase. “No DVD slot. That is the genius of Apple. You don’t want too many features. You have to be willing to lose. Simplicity matters.” This is how he sees Rubrik: “We combined several pieces of hardware and software into a single solution.”

Technology doesn’t have to be hard. “Everyone wants easy. Simplicity is easy to comprehend, easy to operate, easy to propagate.” But beyond his concern for making life easier, he is an idealist in the technical sense that he believes that it is ideas that shape the world rather than the other way around. To him everything seems malleable or “transitional”. “The external world is a manifestation of the internal,” he argues.

At the same time he has a big pragmatic streak that makes him automatically sceptical of certain contemporary mantras. “People talk about the ‘passion’ – but you generate passion by doing things. Along the way you find you’re good at something and then you convince yourself that this is your passion.”

After London, Bipul Sinha is returning to the land of The Golden Gate (as per Vikram Seth’s wonderful novel in sonnets, which he read at college) to see his twin sons, aged six. He laughs at the idea that he might be worried about any negative effects modern technology could have on them down the line. “I don’t worry about technology. It only changes you around the edges,” he says. “The fundamental things remain the same.”