During my 25 years at Cisco, the key trait that helped us stay ahead of the competition was the ability to reimagine ourselves and spot market transitions long before others saw them coming. And in today’s digital world, those market transitions are happening faster and more frequently than ever before. From farming, to manufacturing, to customer engagement – everything that we know is changing right before our eyes.

The byproduct of this digital revolution is that companies are now generating data at an exponential rate. In this new world, data is a company’s most valuable asset, after their employees, of course. But companies have relied on outdated legacy technology to manage and protect that data. The result, as you might expect, isn’t pretty—it’s a cumbersome, time-consuming process that stifles innovation and keeps companies from focusing on what really matters.

Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha saw this market transition coming. In just four years, he’s built a company on a clear path to becoming a multibillion-dollar business and one of the world’s next great enterprise technology companies. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce today that I’ve joined the Rubrik team as both a board advisor and a personal investor.

The Next Market Transition: Enter Cloud Data Management

The cloud represents a new era that liberates enterprises by delivering universal access to their applications. With cloud, enterprises can now reduce cost and time-to-market while retaining business agility. Because of the obvious advantages cloud provides, adoption is no longer a question of if, but how. As cloud adoption accelerated, a clear gap formed in the market for a new data management solution, purpose built for the cloud.

Rubrik developed the world’s first cloud data management platform to give customers power over their data, freeing it from its underlying infrastructure and allowing organizations to fully realize the cloud advantage. This single platform can manage, recover, and protect data in the cloud, at the edge, and on-premises.

Rubrik’s solution is driving critical change for its customers. Here are three reasons why I believe Rubrik is uniquely positioned to be the long-term leader in this market.

1) World-Class Leadership & Respected Investors
To dominate a market in transition, a company must have visionary, bold leadership with an appetite for risk, and the right team to implement it. Rubrik’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, possesses a rare combination of drive, humility and thoughtfulness, in addition to deep domain experience and an excellent reputation. The founding team is comprised of ex-Google, Facebook and Oracle engineers with a track record of building revolutionary, category-defining technologies, such as Google Search.

A startup’s success is largely dependent on their leadership team, and Rubrik has quickly built a world-class team to scale their business in one of the most competitive talent environments. Rubrik’s executive bench includes industry veterans from leading companies like Adobe (Jeff Vijungco, Chief People Officer), Atlassian (Murray Demo, Chief Financial Officer), Box (Peter McGoff, Chief Legal Officer), FireEye (Kara Wilson, Chief Marketing Officer), and Mulesoft (Shay Mowlem, SVP of Product and Strategy).

In addition, Rubrik has raised $292 million in funding from leading venture capital firms Lightspeed Ventures, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and IVP, and prominent angel investors including Chairman of Microsoft John W. Thompson, former DataDomain CEO Frank Slootman, and former Veritas CEO Mark Leslie.

2) An Obsession with Customer Satisfaction
To succeed, companies must keep a close pulse on their customers’ wants and needs. That’s why Rubrik values customer success above all else. Bipul started meeting with customers before engineers even began building the Rubrik platform. The product was tailor-made to address customer pain points.

In less than three years of selling, Rubrik is approaching a $300M annual bookings run rate due to strong traction with mid-market and enterprise customers, including Fortune 50 companies and governments worldwide. Rubrik helps the Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport F1 team move faster, hospitals recover from ransomware attacks, banks protect their data from hurricanes, enterprises comply with GDPR, and governments around the world protect their most sensitive data. Those customers are making repeat purchases and awarding Rubrik with customer satisfaction ratings far above their peers.

3) The Right Partners
Channel relationships can make or break a business. Rubrik’s 100% channel strategy is incredibly smart, helping them build close relationships with some of the largest, most valuable organizations in the world and expand into new markets quickly.

Savvy customers demand choice. Rubrik supports all major cloud providers–AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud–and employs an API-first architecture which makes integrations with tomorrow’s technology simple.

Rubrik is offering the right product, at the right time, with the right mindset. The entire team at JC2 Ventures is committed to the company’s continued success, and I am thrilled to be on this journey with Bipul and his incredible team.