Arvind Jain says the biggest lesson he learned at Google was not just about hard work. It was about having the confidence to back ideas that look unrealistic at first.
Jain, now the co-founder of Rubrik and Glean, told Fortune that he once felt like an imposter after moving from a small town in India to a workplace filled with MIT and Stanford PhDs. By watching his colleagues closely, he says he noticed a pattern that separated the people who rose from the ones who did not.
The trait Jain says mattered most
Jain described the common thread as “intensity, hard work” and the ability to think big. He said the lesson eventually became clear: “You have to think crazy.”
That mindset, he said, was visible in Sundar Pichai before Pichai became CEO of Google in August 2015, more than a decade after joining the company as a product manager.
Jain recalled that Pichai stood out because he kept pushing ideas with long odds, even when others were skeptical. At Google, that became especially clear with Chrome, a project Jain initially thought was a bad idea.
Why Chrome changed the lesson
Browsers were already seen as Microsoft’s territory, Netscape had failed, and even inside Google there was little enthusiasm for taking on the challenge. Jain admitted he was not thinking big enough at the time.
Chrome went on to become the world’s most widely used browser, surpassing rivals by 2012 and helping cement Pichai’s reputation inside Google. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also once dismissed Chrome as a “rounding error,” making the browser’s rise even more striking.
Jain said the experience showed him that major breakthroughs often start with ideas others think are foolish. “That’s when magic happens,” he said.
He added that the same refusal to accept normal limits applied to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who also shared the same “crazy” mindset in his view.
What Jain built after Google
After leaving Google, Jain applied those lessons to his own companies. He co-founded Rubrik, which IPO’d on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 at around $5.6 billion, and later launched Glean, an AI startup now valued at $7.2 billion.
Even now, Jain says he still learns from people around him, especially younger Gen Z hires. “Actually, I feel like I learn the most from the youngest people,” he told Fortune. “They’re the ones who have not seen the things that I’ve seen. They have new points of view.”