Why I joined Glean – Enterprise search, solved

It’s a delight to announce that I’ve joined Glean as the Head of Strategic Verticals. The decision was an easy one – during my entire 20-year entrepreneurial journey, I’ve never encountered a company that stands out as much as Glean does in terms of its exceptional team, product, and product market fit.

Before joining Glean, I’ve often wondered why enterprise search continues to be a critically unsolved problem. There’s no category leader and many iconic technology companies have tried and walked away. It is a very difficult problem that’s only becoming more urgent. 

Better work relies on discovery

As enterprises embark on their digital transformation journey, the amount of data generated grows exponentially. The digital exhaust of the modern knowledge worker creates a complex maze of information repositories embedded within many siloed SaaS and on-Prem applications. Accessing and collating these repositories, keeping the information up-to-date in real-time, ensuring data security, and enforcing data access permissions to protect privacy are very complex problems. 

Search that works well also has to be cognitive –  it has to understand intent, context, content and personalize results for the user. Having worked in machine learning (deep learning and reinforcement learning) for most of my professional life, I can assure you that building such cognitive understanding as a horizontal capability that works at scale is extremely hard. It takes a talented and experienced team to address these challenges, let alone really solve enterprise search.

The path forward

Glean, under the leadership of our exceptional team of world-class machine learning experts, has successfully done so. Stated very simply, our product works, and works beautifully all the time. The product experience is magical and our customers love our product. 

For me, this really clicked during my onboarding process. At Glean, we believe in dogfooding – my onboarding was instrumented using our product. I “Gleaned” all the information I needed and always got the most relevant, accurate, and updated information. Whether I searched “my onboarding checklist”, ”does the company provide lunch”, and so on, the relevance of the results were remarkable. When I looked for “LinkedIn Sales Navigator access”, I not only found the information I needed but astonishingly also learned about LeadIQ and Lusha. Buoyed by the amazing results, I could not stop myself from “Gleaning” on a variety of related topics. The guided knowledge discovery was immersive and at par with my experiences with Google as a consumer.

I am confident that Glean will revolutionize how knowledge workers find information and actionable insights. With bleeding-edge AI breakthroughs in Generative AI and LLMs in particular, Glean is perfectly poised to deliver disruptive value to its customers. Several Tier 1 VCs from the Silicon Valley also share the same excitement and have invested $155M in Glean.

I cannot wait to be a part of this exciting journey.

I invite you to schedule a demo to experience the magic for yourself, and to visit our careers page to join us in creating this magical experience.

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