20VC: Why OpenAI and Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Teams Will Get Bigger Not Smaller in a World of AI | Why AI Removes Incumbents Advantage of Bundling | China vs America: Who Wins the AI War with Arvind Jain, Co-Founder @ Glean
Arvind Jain is the Founder & CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI leader valued at $7.2 billion after raising more than $770 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, and more. Before Glean, Arvind co-founded Rubrik, helping build it into one of the world's leading cloud infrastructure companies before its successful IPO. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, working across Search, Maps, and YouTube.
AGENDA:
00:00 – The Shocking Truth About Frontier AI: 90% Is Already a Commodity 02:04 – Can OpenAI & Anthropic Own Enterprise AI? The Battle for the Workplace Begins 10:18 – Will OpenAI and Anthropic Win the App Layer 18:03 – Microsoft Is the Real Enemy… Not OpenAI? 20:53 – "Where's the ROI?" Why Enterprises Are Starting to Question the AI Hype 26:00 – Will AI Replace Your Job? Harry & Arvind's Heated Clash Over the Future of Work 33:43 – The Billion-Dollar Mistake Every AI Company Is Making on Token Spend 39:20 – The AI Land Grab Is On: Why Founders Must Move Now or Lose Forever 42:20 – China vs America: Who Really Wins the AI Race? 47:20 – Rapid Fire: The Future of Computer Science, Hiring, Fundraising & AI's Biggest Winners
Glean’s fight to own the AI layer inside every company
Enterprise AI is shifting fast from chatbots that answer questions to systems that actually do the work across an organization. But who will own the AI layer that powers all of it?
Glean, which started as an enterprise search product, has evolved into what it calls an “AI work assistant,” aiming to sit underneath other AI experiences, connecting to internal systems, managing permissions, and delivering intelligence wherever employees work.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Glean’s CEO and founder Arvind Jain at Web Summit Qatar to break down how enterprises are thinking about AI architecture, what's driving consolidation, and what's real versus hype in the agent space.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
The fight between bundled AI from tech titans like Microsoft, Google and platform layers like Glean and its competitors.
How AI adoption is reshaping leadership and organizational design.
Why permissions and governance are harder problems than most companies realize.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Why We’re Only Using 1% of AI | Glean CEO Arvind Jain
Glean has grown into a $7.2B company by giving employees AI assistants and agents that extend their capabilities.
CEO Arvind Jain is back on Grit alongside Joubin Mirzadegan. Here’s what stood out:
“My mindset by default is that if you build something last year, that it's got to be obsolete. There has to be a new way to do that thing better today. If not, then it's just lack of imagination.”
“I have no doubts that AI capabilities are just going to increase more and more over the next few years. But even more important is this concept of how much are we even leveraging what AI can do today? I would say that we've not even used 1% of current capabilities of these models”
“If you're trying to be everything to everyone, then you just cannot compete with somebody who's focused on a smaller problem and going deep into that.”
You can also listen to Arvind’s earlier episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIH0Qp6d6bg&list=PLRiWZFltuYPF8A6UGm74K2q29UwU-Kk9k&index=96
Guest: Arvind Jain, founder and CEO, Glean
Connect with Arvind Jain
X: https://x.com/jainarvind
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jain-arvind/
Connect with Joubin
X: https://x.com/Joubinmir
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Follow on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/kpgrit
Follow on X:
https://x.com/KPGrit
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins:https://www.kleinerperkins.com/
AI Enterprise - Databricks & Glean | BG2 Guest Interview
In this BG2 guest interview, Altimeter partner Apoorv Agrawal sits down with Ali Ghodsi (Databricks) and Arvind Jain (Glean) for a candid, operator-level discussion on what’s actually working in enterprise AI—and what isn’t.
They unpack why 95% of AI projects fail, why LLMs are rapidly commoditizing, and why durable advantage is shifting to proprietary data, agentic systems, and workflow integration. The conversation dives deep into real-world use cases across finance, healthcare, and retail; the debate over whether we already have AGI; and how AI spend, CapEx, and valuation bubbles will realistically play out. A must-watch for builder, and investors navigating the AI transition inside real organizations.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(01:00) Consumer AI vs. Enterprise Reality
(02:15) Why 95% of AI Projects Fail
(04:15) RBC, Merck, and 7-Eleven Use Cases
(06:45) What Actually Makes AI Work
(07:00) LLMs Are Commodities—Data Is the Moat
(08:45) Failed AI Bets at Databricks & Glean
(11:00) RPA vs. Generative AI
(14:15) Advice for CIOs Planning AI Budgets
(16:00) AI CapEx and the Revenue Math
(18:00) The Three Camps of AI
(21:00) Making AI Useful Inside Enterprises
(24:30) Why Apps Capture the Value
(30:00) The Future of UI, Voice, and Data Entry
(37:30) Rapid Fire: Winners, Bubbles, Long/Short
Produced by Dan Shevchuk
Music by Yung Spielberg
Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com
Follow:
Apoorv Agrawal @apoorv03 https://x.com/apoorv03
BG2 Pod @bg2pod https://x.com/BG2Pod
The Best of 2025 (So Far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
2025 has thus far been a year of great leaps and advances in AI technology. And Sarah and Elad have spoken with some of the most enterprising founders and scientific minds in the field of AI today. So we’re revisiting a few of our favorite conversations on No Priors so far in 2025 – Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), Brendan Foody (Mercor), Dan Hendrycks (Center for AI Safety), Noubar Afeyan (Flagship Pioneering), Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell (OpenAI o3), Isa Fulford (OpenAI), Arvind Jain (Glen), and Dr. Shiv Rao (Abridge).
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil
Chapters:
00:00 – Episode Introduction
0:21 – Winston Weinberg on Leaning into New Capabilities
02:01 – Dr. Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence
04:13 – Brendan Foody on AI Disruption in the Workforce
06:10 – Dan Hendrycks on the Geopolitics of Superintelligence
08:06 – Noubar Afeyan on Entrepreneurship
10:38 – Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell on Reasoning Models
12:41 – Isa Fulford on Training Deep Research
13:49 – Arvind Jain on Innovating Enterprise Search
16:21 – Dr. Shiv Rao on AI’s Human Impact
18:58 – Conclusion
Arvind Jain on Building Glean and the Future of Enterprise AI
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald sits down with Arvind Jain, CEO and founder of Glean. They discuss Glean's evolution from solving enterprise search to building agentic AI tools that understand internal knowledge and workflows. Arvind shares how his early use of transformer models in 2019 laid the foundation for Glean’s success, well before the term "generative AI" was mainstream.
They explore the technical and organizational challenges behind enterprise LLMs—including security, hallucination suppression—and when it makes sense to fine-tune models. Arvind also reflects on his previous startup Rubrik and explains how Glean’s AI platform aims to reshape how teams operate, from personalized agents to ever-fresh internal documentation.
Follow Arvind Jain: https://x.com/jainarvind
Follow Weights & Biases: https://x.com/weights_biases
Timestamps:
[00:01:00] What Glean is and how it works
[00:02:39] Starting Glean before the LLM boom
[00:04:10] Using transformers early in enterprise search
[00:06:48] Semantic search vs. generative answers
[00:08:13] When to fine-tune vs. use out-of-box models
[00:12:38] The value of small, purpose-trained models
[00:13:04] Enterprise security and embedding risks
[00:16:31] Lessons from Rubrik and starting Glean
[00:19:31] The contrarian bet on enterprise search
[00:22:57] Culture and lessons learned from Google
[00:25:13] Everyone will have their own AI-powered "team"
[00:28:43] Using AI to keep documentation evergreen
[00:31:22] AI-generated churn and risk analysis
[00:33:55] Measuring model improvement with golden sets
[00:36:05] Suppressing hallucinations with citations
[00:39:22] Agents that can ping humans for help
[00:40:41] AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement
[00:42:26] The enduring value of hard work
AI is Making Enterprise Search Relevant, with Arvind Jain of Glean
Arvind Jain joins Sarah and Elad on this episode of No Priors. Arvind is the founder and CEO of Glean, an AI-powered enterprise search platform. He previously co-founded Rubrik and spent over a decade as an engineering leader at Google. In this episode, Arvind shares how LLMs are transforming enterprise search, why most tools in the space have failed, and the opportunity to build apps powered by internal knowledge. He discusses how much customization is still needed on top of foundation models, what made building Glean uniquely challenging compared to Arvind’s previous ventures, and what’s next for the company.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @jainarvind
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
0:58 How LLMs are changing search
2:05 Building out Glean’s platform
5:09 Why most search companies failed
8:41 Out of the box vs. bespoke models
10:26 Creating apps on top of internal knowledge
15:34 User behaviors & insights
19:11 Unique challenges of building Glean
21:51 Product-led growth vs. enterprise sales
25:00 Succeeding in traditionally bad markets
27:08 What Glean is excited to build next
How Glean CEO Arvind Jain Solved the Enterprise Search Problem – and What It Means for AI at Work
Years before co-founding Glean, Arvind was an early Google employee who helped design the search algorithm. Today, Glean is building search and work assistants inside the enterprise, which is arguably an even harder problem. One of the reasons enterprise search is so difficult is that each individual at the company has different permissions and access to different documents and information, meaning that every search needs to be fully personalized. Solving this difficult ingestion and ranking problem also unlocks a key problem for AI: feeding the right context into LLMs to make them useful for your enterprise context. Arvind and his team are harnessing generative AI to synthesize, make connections, and turbo-change knowledge work. Hear Arvind’s vision for what kind of work we’ll do when work AI assistants reach their potential.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
00:00 - Introduction
08:35 - Search rankings
11:30 - Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15:52 - Where enterprise search meets RAG
19:13 - How is Glean changing work?
26:08 - Agentic reasoning
31:18 - Act 2: application platform
33:36 - Developers building on Glean
35:54 - 5 years into the future
38:48 - Advice for founders
The future of enterprise search and AI-powered work productivity with Glean’s Arvind Jain | E1916
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Todays show:
Glean’s Arvind Jain joins Jason to discuss how his startup is building the future of AI-Powered enterprise search (2:35). The two also discuss Google Gemini (42:45), Open-Source vs Closed models (45:17), and much more!
*
Timestamps:
(00:00) Glean’s Arvind Jain joins Jason
(2:35) Glean’s beachhead market and primary focus
(5:13) Glean’s approach to data confidentiality
(11:57) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at http://www.openphone.com/twist
(13:13) Competition against native tools and building language models in SaaS companies
(17:00) Glean’s approach to permissions
(24:20) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist
(25:23) Compliance and the "CEO God Mode" feature
(29:28) Potential of productivity software, and people analytics in tech businesses
(38:50) Gelt - It’s time to take control over your taxes. https://joingelt.com/twist now
(40:04) Impact of AI on business models
(42:45) Arvind’s thoughts on Google Gemini
(45:17) Open source vs closed models in AI development and the progress of OpenAI
(47:49) AGI and the limitations and potential of AI as an assistant
*
Check out:
https://cybernews.com/security/chatgpt-samsung-leak-explained-lessons/#google_vignette
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X: https://twitter.com/jainarvind
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvind-jain-5935161
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X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
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Thank you to our partners:
(11:57) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at http://www.openphone.com/twist
(24:20) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist
(38:50) Gelt - It’s time to take control over your taxes. Visit joingelt.com/twist now
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Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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SaaStr 717: How Enterprise SaaS Companies are Buying AI (or Not) with ContextualAI, Anthropic, and Glean
SaaStr 717: How Enterprise SaaS Companies are Buying AI (or Not) with ContextualAI, Anthropic, and Glean
While AI seems to have gone mainstream for consumers and smaller SaaS companies, but what about the big guys?
While the first generation of Generative AI is great, it's not quite ready to solve Enterprise problems. So, where are we now in the adoption cycle for the Enterprise world?
We brought together an Enterprise SaaS panel with:
Douwe Kiela, CEO of ContextualAI
Benjamin Mann, co-founder of Anthropic
Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean
and Sandhya Hedge, General Partner at Unusual VC
To help us figure out how to sell GenAI software to some of the biggest organizations in the world.
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Join us in 2024 at:
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SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200
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#168 CEO & Founder Glean, Arvind Jain w/ Mamoon Hamid: New Playbook
Guest: Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean, and Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins
“I’m an engineer, so I have doubts about everything,” says Glean founder and CEO Arvind Jain. Well ... almost everything. Since launching Glean in 2019, he has held to the belief that “all of us are going to have really powerful AI assistants” in the future. With a several-year lead on generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Glean has built a growing club of CIO fans. With the broad acceptance of AI over the past year, Arvind says, “the level of confidence is higher than ever before.”
In this episode, Arvind, Mamoon, and Joubin discuss golfer hats, ideas vs. execution, X1, energy audits, small towns in India, IIT, proving yourself, Rubrik, rejecting product-led growth, “workplace assistants,” CIO fans, internet ’94, Parker Conrad, and work as a hobby.
In this episode, we cover:
Arvind’s newfound fame (01:08)
The state of the AI business (03:42)
“Why now?” (06:05)
Building great products (09:16)
Company-building (11:27)
Arvind’s childhood (14:37)
Competition and hard work (16:44)
Leaving Google (18:46)
Glean vs. Rubrik (20:53)
The future of work (27:22)
“Holy shit” moments (29:25)
Finding positivity (32:51)
AI hype (34:31)
How to pick a venture capitalist (38:55)
Turning off (42:24)
Hiring and the meaning of “grit” (44:41)
Links:
Connect with ArvindLinkedIn
Connect with MamoonTwitter
LinkedIn
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
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