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

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