Glean CEO says Google leaders taught him to back unlikely ideas

Arvind Jain, the former Google engineer who later co-founded Rubrik and Glean, told Fortune that his years inside Google taught him to take unlikely ideas seriously. Jain, whose AI company Glean is valued at $7.2 billion, said he saw a shared trait in Sundar Pichai, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: they did not treat conventional limits as fixed.

Jain told Fortune he arrived at Google after moving to the United States from a small town in India and felt out of place among colleagues with elite academic backgrounds. He said that feeling pushed him to study the people around him and ask why some employees advanced while others did not.

One of the people he watched closely was Pichai, who had joined Google as an individual contributor before rising through the company. Pichai became Google’s CEO in August 2015, a little more than 10 years after joining, according to Fortune.

The Chrome lesson

Jain told Fortune that Pichai’s work on Google Chrome became a defining example for him. At the time, Jain said, he viewed a Google browser as a poor idea because Microsoft dominated the category and Netscape had already stumbled.

Jain said Pichai’s push for Chrome showed him that effort alone was not enough. He told Fortune that the leaders who stood out paired hard work with the confidence to pursue plans that others considered unrealistic.

Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer once dismissed Chrome as a “rounding error,” according to Fortune. Chrome later overtook rival browsers, and by 2012 had become the world’s most-used browser, Fortune reported.

Jain said the experience changed how he judged ambitious projects. He told Fortune that Page and Brin, like Pichai, appeared to operate without mental constraints on what could be built.

From Google to startups

After leaving Google, Jain applied those lessons to company-building, Fortune reported. He co-founded Rubrik, a cloud data management company, and later started Glean, which builds AI tools that help workers search and understand information across a company.

Reuters reported that Rubrik went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 at a valuation of about $5.6 billion. Glean is now valued at $7.2 billion, according to Fortune.

Jain told Fortune that his Google years left him with two main lessons: sustained work matters, and leaders also need a willingness to ignore ordinary assumptions about what is practical. He presented Pichai’s Chrome push as the example that made the point clear to him.

Jain also said he continues to learn from colleagues at Glean. He told Fortune that younger employees, including Gen Z hires, often bring the freshest perspective because they have not seen the same patterns he has seen.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.