#182 CEO and Co-Founder Cribl, Clint Sharp: Finding Traction

Grit

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Guest: Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of Cribl

New employees are joining the remote data platform Cribl every week, and as the staff grows, CEO Clint Sharp has noticed a problem: He can’t file a bug report without a lot of caveats. When there were a handful of users, no one would bat an eye at the CEO posting a bug on Slack, but now he has had to learn how to phrase things because people assume he’s “irate and we should change everything we’re doing,” Clint says. “I’ll post something and there’s a flurry of DMs that are happening in the background, like ‘Oh my God.’” Unless the tone of his bug report is clear, workers with more experience at Cribl then have to reassure the newbies: “Calm down. When he does this, he’s not upset. He’s one of the power users of the product.”

In this episode, Clint and Joubin discuss being on the road, niche audiences, top-of-funnel problems, “come to Jesus” meetings, moving the goalposts, building for building’s sake, “down and to the right,” mediating re-orgs, flat organizations, filing bugs as the CEO, setting the example, Henry Schuck, Baldur’s Gate III, legal narratives, Hacker News, Cisco, Doug Merritt, Gary Steele, Rippling, and dead trends.

In this episode, we cover:

(01:08) - Running a remote company
(02:57) - Cribl’s management meetings
(05:56) - Looking back and recognition
(08:08) - Growing quickly and what Cribl does
(11:21) - Traction
(14:53) - Solving a new problem
(17:56) - Friends and family funding
(21:45) - Why not shut it all down?
(24:36) - Healthy arrogance and control
(31:02) - Serial entrepreneurs and founder-CEOs
(33:38) - What Clint loves about the job
(35:31) - The hardest parts
(38:41) - Core values
(41:43) - Favorite interview questions
(44:26) - Drawing boundaries
(47:18) - Vacation and work-life balance
(52:53) - Splunk’s lawsuit against Clint
(56:26) - “Their brand is synonymous with expensive”
(58:41) - Who owns the data?
(01:01:59) - Building platforms
(01:07:35) - “I’m so sick of AI”
(01:11:25) - Who Cribl is hiring

Links:

Connect with Clint
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

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