No Priors Ep. 115 | With Glean Founder and CEO Arvind Jain

(music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome to No Priors. This week, we're speaking to Arvind Jain, CEO and co-founder of Gleen. Gleen is an AI-powered enterprise search and knowledge management platform, which allows you to not only access all the different internal documents and Slacks and other things that your company may have, but also allows you to enhance workplace productivity by using different applications on top of that. Prior to Gleen, Arvind had a really storied career. He co-founded Rubrik. He was early at Google, worked on search there, amongst other things, and so we're very excited to have him here today. Arvind, welcome to No Priors.

Thank you for having me.

So I'm really excited about this. Um, I've known you for years and Elad's known you for maybe 15 more years than that. Um, you're an amazing repeat successful founder with Rubrik and Gleen. Uh, I wanna start by just asking you about search. Um, you've been a search guy, you know, since before it was cool, for a long time when it felt like, not solved, but not as dynamic. Um, how broadly has search changed because of LLMs?

So I've been working on search for almost 30 years now. Long, long time. The paradigm has completely shifted. I think I would say that search had been static for a long time. It was this keyword-based paradigm, like, you know, people ask questions, you find words and try to find them in documents and bring them up, you know, uh, to the users. But LLMs have completely changed it. Like when it's, it has actually, the main thing it has done for search is that it has allowed us to really deeply understand, uh, a question that a user is asking, and similarly, it allows us to very deeply understand what a document is about and you can actually, you know, match people's questions with, you know, the right information conceptually and, and that gives us so much, so much more powers. It's not brittle anymore and I think it's been a, it's- it's- it's been a foundational technology to- to really evolve search into these new experiences that you're seeing these days. You know, where you can go far beyond just surfacing a few links, you know, to, uh, to an end user, to- to actually deeply understand their questions and- and answering them, uh, for them directly using- using the knowledge that you have.

If I remember correctly, Gleen got started in the more traditional search world and that as these foundation models and these LLMs have come to the fore, you've really kind of shifted how you think about both the capability set that you provide and how you approach things. Could you tell us a bit more about how you started off building the systems and how that's shifted and then how you've kind of mapped new use cases against it? Because you're now effectively like this really interesting platform that can be used in all sorts of ways in- inside of an organization, around the corpus of information they have. I'd actually love to hear the technology transition. Like how did you think about that? When did it happen?