Most CEOs keep board meetings private.
But for the first seven to eight years of building the data management firm Rubrik, Bipul Sinha let every employee in.
“We put the board meeting in a large conference room,” the CEO and cofounder said on an episode of “The Logan Bartlett Show” published Friday. “We let people sit on the ground if needed.”
“People could ask questions, so it was not a webinar style,” Sinha said. “We’ve had situations where people actually asked hard questions in the middle of the board meeting.”
As many as 800 staff members tuned in to some of these sessions, Sinha said.
“It is a direct result of this idea of transparency that really created alignment and velocity,” the former venture partner at Lightspeed said.
“Everybody knew where we are going and what needed to be done,” he added.
Sinha cofounded Rubrik in 2014. The company went public in April last year and is worth $19 billion.
The meetings, Sinha said, were his way of showing there were “no sacred cows” and “no information control.”
“Everybody can demand answers, and when people demand answers, then people also become very responsible, they take it very personally,” he said.
The format wasn’t without friction. Some VCs and executives were initially skeptical, Sinha said.
“It was a little non-intuitive for them initially,” Sinha said. “Sometimes you don’t realize how many people are on the call, and we would have discussions about an individual,” he added.
Eventually, Rubrik had to close the meetings to employees “because of the IPO and other activity,” Sinha said.
Sinha did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Rubrik isn’t the only company that has pushed for more transparency in high-stakes meetings.
At Blackstone, senior leaders make it a point to involve junior staff during the private equity firm’s deal meetings.
“We’ll go around in many of these committees and ask the most junior people in the room, ‘hey, what do you think?'” Blackstone President Jon Gray said earlier this year. “We want them to articulate why they have conviction.”
An associate who interned twice at Blackstone told Business Insider that juniors were encouraged to make their presence known. A senior leader said to him that “rank doesn’t matter here.”
