The Power of Purpose: Employee-Centric Cribl has Thousands of Customer Success Stories to Tell, Yet Focused on Strengthening its Core Values

“Cribl was born of an age where diversity and inclusion were a top priority.” 

Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of Cribl, and his co-founders (Dritan Bitincka and Ledion Bitincka) recognized that companies were struggling to get value from their sprawling log analytics environments and were experiencing exponential growth in data volumes every year, without corresponding budget increases. Enterprises had to make tough choices of what to keep or what to drop, and lacked a comprehensive view of their data across their tooling. No one kept the interests of the operators in mind. Overworked ITOps, SecOps, and SREs need to keep their applications operational and secure without compromising visibility or compliance. Cribl was founded with that customer in mind.

Cribl is an observability pipeline company that provides administrators control over their data in motion. It operates worldwide.

Cribl-created solutions deliver innovative and customizable controls to route security and observability data where it has the most value. These solutions help slash costs, improve performance, and get the right data, to the right destinations, in the right formats, at the right time. Cribl helps companies instrument everything, so they can analyze more and pay less.

Partnering with investors CRV, Sequoia, Greylock, Redpoint, and IVP, the company is well-positioned to grow as smoothly as possible. Cribl customers such as Autodesk, TransUnion, and Blue Voyant absolutely love the company and its products, especially Cribl LogStream.

Cribl was set up in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, California.

The Silicon Review reached out to Clint Sharp who spoke about how Cribl is making a difference in this segment and planning to lead the pack from the front. Below is an excerpt.

“Cribl was born of an age where diversity and inclusion were a top priority. From the onboarding of our first employees, the team wanted diversity, equity, and inclusion to be among the essential values in our culture. We believe that this helps drive innovation and that’s ultimately good for customers. Moreover, this aligns with our core value of customers first, always.”

One of the company’s core values is transparency. To hold true to that value, especially in a period of rapid growth, Cribl now hosts ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions with its executive team every other week. In addition, the three co-founders spend 30 minutes each month getting to know the newest employees.”

Cribl has hired a full-time Program Manager for DEI programs to assure hiring practices and culture are aligned to hire and grow diverse talent within the company. Some of the initial programs being rolled out are Interrupting Implicit Bias Training and the formation of Employee Resource Groups.

For a company of just over 225 people, Cribl has developed a robust employee-relations program. “As a fast-growing company built on a culture of ‘remote-first’ work, we’re constantly looking at our future needs for employees and managers. To that end, we are implementing a career development program for employees using a people management platform. This allows us to foster deliberate career progression.”

“In addition to our remote-first environment, we have also offered ‘Recharge Days’ to encourage our employees to disconnect and enjoy time outside of work.”

More importantly, the company is building a culture where differences are valued and welcomed. Nearly 25 percent of its executive team and 20 percent of its board of directors identify as women. Across the company, 20-29 percent of employees are women.

“Besides, Cribl will be a generational company, and employee growth is critical to that. We ensure our employees have growth opportunities in several ways. We host Performance Review Cycles twice per year to ensure we are having intentional, feedback-focused discussions around the career progression of our employees. We have multiple methods of collecting employee feedback. We’ve also invested in a people management platform to help guide meaningful one-on-ones and intentional development conversations outside of our review cycles.”

Roadmap

Cribl had a breakout FY2021 with a notable customer and company growth on top of an amazing $200m funding round led by Greylock, Redpoint, and IVP. In addition, Cribl plans to continue expanding Cribl Cloud and building additional functionality to help customers gain control and visibility over observability data.

Clint Sharp | CEO and Co-Founder

Clint Sharp spent the last two decades leading product management and IT operations at technology and software companies, including Splunk and Cricket Communications.

As a former practitioner, Clint has deep expertise in network issues, database administration, and security operations. No origin story of Cribl can start anywhere but at Splunk. Clint met both of the other two Cribl co-founders Ledion and Dritan at Splunk. As Ledion, Dritan, and Clint worked with dozens of enterprises through 2017 and into early 2018, it became clear that logging was still an incredible pain point. And once outside of Splunk, a clearer view of the market began to emerge. Customers valued their existing tooling. Some had hundreds of trained users who were logging in regularly to troubleshoot in Splunk or Kibana, and many had dozens of distinct departmental workspaces that had rich role-based access to many internal dashboards. Customers had deep investments in their existing tools.

“One of the company’s core values is transparency. To hold true to that value, especially in a period of rapid growth, Cribl now hosts ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions with its executive team every other week. In addition, the three co-founders spend 30 minutes each month getting to know the newest employees.”