#PowerToThePerson Interview — CRV’s Max Gazor Chats with Cribl’s Co-Founder and CEO, Clint Sharp
By Max Gazor, General Partner, Enterprise
Here at CRV we’re kicking off a brand new series of casual fireside chats between our investors and some of the incredible founders of companies we back here at CRV. These snack size interviews are all 12 minutes or less in length. (Our thoughts are that no one has an extra 30 minutes or an hour in their schedule, but everyone has at least one wonky 12 minute slot in between meetings where they can learn something new and listen to fresh perspectives.)
For our first pairing, I sat down with Cribl’s co-founder and CEO, Clint Sharp. Cribl is on an absolute tear. Clint and the team founded the company just a few years ago in 2017 and CRV has backed the company since 2019 when we first invested in Cribl’s seed round.
Today Cribl announced it secured $200 million in new funding bringing its total funding to date to $254 million. We proudly participated in Cribl’s most recent Series C round.
“We were able to pick a partner who understood really early stage incredibly well.” — Clint Sharp, Cribl’s Co-Founder and CEO
A recap of our conversation can be found below, but you can also watch the full discussion over on CRV’s YouTube channel.
Clint and I talked about a number of topics including:
- Why Clint became an entrepreneur.
- Who Cribl is hyper focused on these days (IT and security professionals, DevOps, SRE, security threat hunters, people in the security operations center, the network operations center, etc.).
- The importance of finding the right VC partner early on and some of the kinds of things you may want your investor to be able to help out with. (Hiring executives, navigating the valley, talking to people in later stage investing, how to think about further fundraising, etc.)
“A really great investor is that person who holds you accountable to make sure things are going right.” — Clint Sharp, Cribl’s Co-Founder and CEO
…but I wasn’t the only one asking the questions. Clint asked me questions too.
“Be yourself. Be authentic… and show passion and commitment to something. Those are the qualities we like.” — Max Gazor, General Partner at CRV
During our chat we also discussed:
- Some of the qualities we tend to see over here at CRV in iconic founders and companies.
- Advice I’d give to entrepreneurs meeting me for the first time.
- When founders ought to start reaching out and discussing funding with VCs.
“There’s no such thing as too early for CRV.” — Max Gazor, General Partner at CRV
Clint also reminisces about some of his proudest moments at Cribl. The pandemic, its impact on Cribl and the competitive advantages of being a remote first workplace are other topics we also address.
“We were remote first even before COVID and I think it’s the future of work.” — Clint Sharp, Cribl’s Co-Founder and CEO
He also provides some nuggets of wisdom for up-and-coming business owners including the importance of having a go-to-market strategy.
Clint’s a busy guy, especially with this morning’s funding announcement coming out, so I’m thrilled that he was able to carve out some time to chat with me. The progress and momentum that Cribl has seen over such a short period of time is phenomenal. Large enterprise customers like Cox Automotive, FINRA and Rivian are raving about how Cribl allows them to increase the scope and reduce the cost of their data analytics. We’re looking forward to the future, one with a new open architecture for observability, and continuing to watch Cribl’s rocket ship take flight.
